You don't need to ban them, just make them meet the same regulations on safety and zoning that regular hotels have to
I agree. A lot of the trouble that Airbnb causes can be mitigated with simple regulations that we already have in place. Additionally, we should recognize that Airbnb is currently filling a void in the market that hotels aren't currently filling. There are times when people want to rent a place to stay for a full week or a month and also not have to pay to eat out every night. Airbnb allows you to rent a place that's generally cheaper for longer stays and also provides a basic kitchen including cookware and dishes. Hotels just don't have that unless you pay a premium. The only other thing they offer, which I'm on the fence about, is the ability to rent a place in close proximity or directly in a specific neighborhood or town as opposed to whatever area has a hotel to host tourists. On the one hand, that's super nice for exploring cities and doing non-touristy things. On the other hand, residents deserve some separation from tourists especially since they don't all behave. If hotels can find a way to fill these gaps, then I'd be ok with banning Airbnb. But we can also just regulate Airbnb 🤷
I feel like several advantages of Airbnb comes specifically from the lack of regulation. I'm speculating, but I imagine installing kitchens and maintaining them costs quite a lot as a hotel, with probably stricter and more expensive regulations compared to an Airbnb. I wouldn't be surprised if Airbnbs were regulated similarly to hotels, that they'd be priced higher due to all the costs. It doesn't make sense to me that a hotel, with 10s or hundreds of units, where not all units have to be rented out at once, is more expensive than a single property home where the whole unit must be rented out at once, and it takes up a bigger space. not to mention the inefficiency of repairs, and cleaning.
You might be right on the potential cost, but aren't all Residence Inns basically this? I don't think they cost that much more than other hotels.
I used to work away a lot, an airbnb was always a considered option - even when my meals were paid for. Sometimes you want to have a place to chill at for the week, not just a room.
Saying that though I generally didn't use airbnb for this, booking.com often has holiday lets as well - or better yet go directly to the owner's website.
Another way you could handle that is that any property you own after your 1st or 2nd, automatically attracts commercial property tax rates.
That should not disallow private individual to rent a spare room, or holiday home, but it will kill off the investment businesses that specialise running airbnb syndicates.
Additionally, if a property has not had a full time occupant for at least 9 of the 12 months in a year, it is subject to a wealth tax based on its value.
That should deal with the investment firms that just sit on massive stocks of empty homes and business properties, feeding off the increasing prices they are creating themselves, while adding no value and offering no service.
Also kick the CEO and everybody in his general vicinity in the nuts. This should be law.
Tough, but fair
Everyone who says "ban them" seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.
I dislike Airbnb because it's expensive. The concept of "renting a room" in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.
what about not allowing companies to buy hundreds of houses as rental property?
It's not just companies. Individuals are also chain buying places. Establish income from airbnb, leverage for their next purchase.
My real estate agent was buying his 3rd airbnb while I was looking 2 years ago. Dude was in his late 20s.
I'm hoping the house of cards comes crumbling down. Been dealing with housing insecurity as my landlord terminated our lease.
I’ve seen on Airbnb people who own 50+ properties.
I used air bnb and fees times and found it more expensive and a hassle compared to a hotel.
250 dollar cleaning fee but you want me to take out all the trash, was the sheets, sweep, mop etc. no thank you
I priced out an air bnb versus one of the nicer extended stay places. The ones that are larger and nicer than the apartments I have lived in.
Guess what came in at 1/3 less cost, had maid service, and a free breakfast.
I am all for banning Air BNB flat out unless the owner is living in the building. I am okay with a person buying a house and then renting out rooms or converting a basement to an apartment to lend out. It doesn't remove available housing inventory from market to sit empty most of the year.
I remember this scene in The Big Short. Steve Carell goes to a strip club.
While I do agree with your point, individuals aren't buying hundreds or thousands of properties. It's corporations buying up a limited resource that are driving up the prices, not I-own-three-houses landlords.
Nah, I'm gonna go ahead and still be mad at both despite them being different degrees of bullshit. Thanks.
An individual landlord isn't buying hundreds of properties, but hundreds of individual landlords (all saying "it's not my fault, I only own three houses!") are buying hundreds of properties.
Even if each individual landlord is a good person who's going to heaven, they still make the housing market worse for everyone else. Their interests are directly opposed to working class people.
Absolutely true.
I work in a highly paid industry and during the 2010-2015, nearly everybody was investing in real estate. Most of the lunchroom talks were about finding properties, showing off our house investments, and speculating if an area would boom. There were startups catered to folks like us to just give them money and they'll handle the cleaning and maintenance.
Then we got distracted by Bitcoin and all other weird things.
Focusing on AirBnB is better in my opinion because of the difference between the two.
A company buying a home to rent still has to rent the property, so they aren't removing the housing supply. In contrast, a person or corporation buying a home to use as an AirBnB is removing housing from the market.
Companies should not own houses. Residents of houses should own their own houses.
Nobody should own someone else's house. A roof over one's head is a basic human right. Not an extortionate investment.
The problem with companies owning hundreds of houses is that they hire property management companies to manage these houses that were built by the lowest bidders and everybody blames each other when something needs to be maintained and the maintenance never gets done and the people living in the houses suffer because they are paying their hard-earned money to these companies while their shoddily-built houses are falling apart.
remember there are real actual humans hiding behind the facade of these corporations, greedy extortionate millionaires & billionaires thriving on exponential dollars from poor people's paychecks, and this needs to be stopped.
Good. Sorry to every mom and pop who treated housing like an investment, but at least you still have the house. Hope they slash the market 90%. Hope everyone who's been waiting for a decade gets a place to live. Hope opportunistic landlords choke and go bust when they can't pay three mortgages on their tenants' salaries anymore. Housing is a human right.
It's definitely not going to slash it 90% to do that you'd have to make moves to guarantee houses are always losing value, much in the same way cars do, so that you have a thriving used house market for people that can't afford, or don't care, to buy new.
That means either implementing the construction of houses with materials that have a short life, or forcing houses to be torn down after, let's say 50 years.
I'd prefer just getting rid of ownership of property, but i dont know if we are ready for that as a society.
How about we ban companies like Blackstone from buying up all the auction homes, lightly flipping them and then putting them back on the market as overpriced rentals?
They're a big reason for our housing shortage.
Why not both? Airbnb severely increases prices, and properties bought by corporations do the same. I'm tired of not doing anything because "what about "
Yeah I'd like to still be able to afford a goddamn vacation.
AirBnB isn't even really worth it from a cost perspective:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/are-airbnbs-more-cost-effective-than-hotels
People are suffering by the millions as a result of the housing crisis, and AirBnB is contributing. So fuck AirBnB, it isn't worth the price society pays. No such corporation or service should exist.
It's bizarre. My house makes as much per year as I do.
propertys have more rights than humans
Now if only they would stop framing the dropping of home prices as a bad thing.
Don't attack the homeless, attack the lack of homes.
If you think banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis outside touristic spots, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale. Probably lots of rentals with landlords not in it for profit, think Vienna-style.
All landlords are in it for the profit. They should instead do more condominiums, so you can own the space you live in. We shouldn't have to live the rest of our lives paying rent.
Government-owned apartments don't need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.
You'll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren't free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it's not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.
True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.
Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that's basically a solarpunk megabuilding.
I honestly think that's preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and 'climbing the ladder'.
The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again
Is this what responsible governments do? I would have figured that Airbnb and the ~~gamblers~~ investors in the housing market would have ~~bribed~~ lobbied hard against this.
~~gamblers~~ ~~investors~~ SCALPERS
I don't like AirBNB and still think they should be banned, but not sure that what the graphic is stating has really panned out in Palm Springs.
According to Redfin, median Palm Springs home sale prices had appeared to drop by about $200k in Sept 2023 (to around $500k), but within two months they were right back close to where they had been before. They're sitting at about +18.4% year-over-year for median home sale prices. Given that alot of the properties for sale still appear to be in the millions, I'm not sure that they're representative of what we see in the rest of the country. There may be other data points out there that paint a different picture, that's just the first thing I looked up.
I only just now noticed that the AirB&B logo looks like a vagina with balls
Airbnbussy
I was recently in palm springs, and not only is it among the shittiest-vibe towns I've visited, with some of the worst restaurants I've been to anywhere in California, I saw a depressing, near windowless, one-story home with no yard for sale at $3M. Their market made absolutely zero sense, I feel like this was inevitable, especially after speculative building during the pandemic.
Did sites like VRBO for vacation and large house rentals exist for AirBnb? I didn't really book those at that point. While I agree airbnb should probably be replaced by hotels (like in the past) was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn't for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a ~~leech~~ landlord - which is part of why we're in such a bad situation now with the housing market.
La times article about it (may be a pay wall) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-23/palm-springs-capped-airbnb-rentals-now-some-home-prices-are-in-free-fall
This seems like a good thing. 1.5 million dollar homes aren't selling well? Maybe cheaper homes or apartments will have better mass appeal.
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