September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb | Hacker News Reader

September 15 Is a Big Day for Airbnb

jeremyobriant.com

27 pointsjobriant1127 comments

One incorrect statement: "Requiring insurance coverage on the property of at least $150k (Airbnb has this covered)"

From Airbnb directly: "The Host Guarantee is not insurance and should not be considered as a replacement or stand-in for homeowners or renters insurance."

Last I'd checked, it didn't cover anything within the building outside the rented unit. And only things within the unit owned by the renter... so no appliances, fixtures, walls, common areas, doors, hallways, etc. Airbnb's site is now very vague on what the 'guarantee' covers.

I think one of the biggest advantages of the proposed laws is freeing up rent controlled units that are currently be hoarded for Airbnb and not being used as primary residences.

How many units are we talking about here? 10? 100? 1000? 10000?

I doubt it's more than a couple hundred. That's a lot of people who can't find good housing for sure, but I doubt it's enough to have any real impact on the price of rental housing in the city.

That seems like a dubious benefit to me. So we pass all these regulations (rent control) that end up leading to inadequate market supply. The solution to this is to... pass laws leading to inadequate market supply in temporary lodging?

There is not one single 'supply' here. There is a supply of permanent housing, and a supply of temporary lodging. Rent control was passed to ensure an affordable supply of the former, not the latter.

I just got back from a week vacation, staying in a house we rented through VRBO.com.

Can anyone explain why VRBO, which has been in operation for 15 years, and explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes, has not faced the backlash and scrutiny that AirBnB has? Is it just that they have not done enough volume to get the regulators' attention?

Because reading about the proposed rules in this article, VRBO rentals seem like they would violate at least one of them:

> -Requiring hosts to only rent out their primary residence and setting guidelines on how many days they must occupy the unit each year (currently 275 days)

I think it has to do with the whole 'explicitly focuses on renting out 2nd homes' deal. To me, it makes more sense to allow people to rent out properties that they own rather than units that they themselves are renting. I'm fine with someone renting their summer cottage on a lake in Vermont - less fine with someone explicitly renting scarce property in SF for the sole purpose of flipping on Airbnb.

I don't know how AirBnB works in San Francisco, but in other countries it IS mostly a tax-evading hotel alternative, and renting out primary residences is very, very rare.

I'm looking for rentals in a South American city, and there are quite a few owners with 10+ properties (more the norm than the exception), and I actually prefer those (I've had bad experiences with sloppy hosts, professional hosts haven't let me down yet).

Such regulation in those countries would greatly diminish the appeal of AirBnB to said hosts (they would probably look for an unregulated alternative).

In Europe I've seen both. I rented a place in Finland that was a college student's apartment; he'd rent it on some weekends and just stay with his girlfriend those weekends. There are definitely people doing it "as a business" as well, and some of the challenge in using it as a customer is trying to figure out which is which (I prefer to rent from the person who lives there). You can usually tell, from how many properties they have listed, how frequently they have reviews, what their booking schedule looks like, whether they themselves ever stay places or only host, etc., but it takes an extra level of manual filtering.

For renting of rooms or couches (vs. renting whole apartments), a much larger percentage are people renting out parts of their own living space, so you stay with the resident and usually meet them or even hang out with them, kinda "couchsurfing for money". Though there are some such listings (esp. in NYC) where a shared rental is shared with other AirBnB renters, not with the permanent resident, and I definitely avoid those.

I suspect that renting out primary residences is more common in rural areas where someone would otherwise operate a B&B.

Hey op, not a big deal but I found a spell check error in your post. Last paragraph you say I continue to be memorized when I think you mean mesmerized.

Hey, FYI, blog owner: You're serving some form of terrible dot-matrix font from the 80s ("monserrat") to Chrome/Windows. This was the first time in months I've had to dig in with the inspector and disable a font just so that I could read an article.

Might want to fix that.

If I recall correctly, this is the (lackof I think) Direct Write bug.

Take a look in About://flags and toggle the one with Direct Write (I think your turning it on) and it should look far prettier.

Are you seriously suggesting that he put a banner on his blog asking his users to monkey around with experimental flags just so they can read text on the page?

While I'm personally technical enough to deal with wackiness like this when I come across it, most people are not. Given that, maybe a better solution would be to choose a font that the most popular browser on the most popular operating system can render out of the box. That's why I pointed it out.

No, he is suggesting you jacked up your settings and offered a solution for you. Tested on a half dozen different combos of Chrome/Windows here and no issues.

Montserrat looks great over here (albeit mac): http://i.imgur.com/BNdPqG0.png

Looks fine on Ubuntu 14.04.

Sad how many people think its good to abolish property rights. Careful what you ask for.

The phrase "[the] sharing economy" continues to grate. It's the "renting economy".

A bunch of entities, through technological means, enable people to efficiently make parts of their capital rentable.

There's no sharing involved, here.

Anyone else look at the seats in the top picture and think "back trouble".

I couldn't imagine sitting in solid wooden chairs for 8 hours a day! The pain would be unbearable.

That's their cafeteria.

Thank god for that! :-)

>-Limiting those under rent control provisions to not make more from home-sharing than their rent (some people are not happy about this one)

Hah. Talk about entitled. Complaining they cant rent for market rates while living at below market rates. Not surprising though coming from people who illegally rent out others property.

If they have a rent-controlled apartment, and they're subletting it, where do they live? And if they're getting "market rates" (which I doubt), and still qualify for a rent-controlled apartment, then I say let them keep the money.

My understanding is you don't "qualify" for rent control in SF. You automatically get it when you move into a building built before 1979.

Then the landlord can only increase rent (as a general rule) by about 1% per year.

So there are people living in 4 bedroom homes in the middle of the best parts of the Mission paying $1000 a month in rent where market rate would be between $6000-8000.

Man, I don't understand anything about SF housing :p At that point, the landlords should be putting all their places on AirBNB themselves! Or arranging for tenants to sublet at market rates and taking a cut under the table, to reduce their chance of being exposed a bit.

They can't just kick out the current tenants to do that.

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