What happened to Airbnb?::Financially, the Airbnb is thriving, but guests, hosts, and cities have had enough.
You must log in or register to comment.
I can’t afford a house in my hometown in part because cunts buy houses to be airbnbs. Fuck them. I will always book a hotel unless there’s literally no other option. I don’t want to give my money to grifters who are ruining the housing market. I also ratted my mom’s neighbor out to the city for running one out of his house. He timed the market and bought after '08 when he was working for a small social network startup. Now he doesn’t even live in that house anymore and instead of selling, uses it as an airbnb. He is an exec at what is now a very large social media company. He absolutely does not need the money, but keeps the house as an asset and rents it on airbnb. I didn’t win the birth year lottery and get a chance to buy the dip. Instead I came of age with an all time high housing market that has only gone up. Then rates went up because fuck u specifically Raiderkev. Fuck air BNB. Report every last one to the city. They are likely in violation of some ordinance. People need to vote with their wallets and drive these grifters to sell and not let it be profitable for them.
So there’s this company that’s been buying up about 30% of houses in many cities to turn them into rentals. They outbid everyone. That’s a bigger issue than the few air bnb.
I lived in one of ‘those homes’ once… All 5 bedrooms and the garage which I stayed in was at least 1000 a month. And it was bare minimum amenities. One refrigerator shared with everyone, stove top was broken the entire time, one restroom and shower, and half of the folks had no idea how to clean dishes.
This is a myth. Airbnb has too few properties listed to actually have any impact on property prices. The shortage is real, but it’s not of their making.
Want lower prices? Build more houses. Somehow, this simple solution is being rejected in favour of blaming scapegoats.
Edit: The best cherrypicked statistic somebody could show was that Airbnb drives prices up by $1800 / year. Setting aside the accuracy of it, if that’s breaking the bank, you probably shouldn’t be buying a house anyway.
I guess you heard that from a friend? Maybe try to question things more and do your own research. There’s tons of verifiable information out there and it’s easy to access.
Based on the median growth in Airbnb listings nationally, the short-term rentals contributed to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in home prices for median zip code, the study’s authors found.
Does that really seem like a lot in context of buying a house? It certainly doesn’t look like it to me. Also, lay off the ad hominem attacks
$9 x 12 = $108 increase per year. Also, you chose that sentence probably because it was the lower one despite the first paragraph being:
Short-term rentals via apps such as Airbnb contribute to housing shortages and rent increases, according to research published last week by Felix Mindl and Dr. Oliver Arentz, researchers at University of Cologne in Germany. They attributed 14.2% of overall rent increases to short-term rentals or 320 euros ($385) per year for new tenants.
$9 x 12 = $108 increase per year
It’s an ANNUAL increase of $9, not a monthly increase. That aside, my original point was about property prices, not rentals. I picked that line because it’s the first line I found discussing sale price. I made no claims about rental prices and still don’t.
the ban has made not one iota of impact in Honolulu.
This type of rhetoric seems to always point at “oh but it’s something else that’s the problem, leave my airbnbs alone there are too few of them”
https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundfile-166717.pdf read some actual studies and see how much of the real estate stock is held by short term rentals and tell us about how those few properties have low impact on property prices. I’d love to see what kind of impact Toronto would have if those 9100 dwellings would be available to Torontonians. That’s about 56 dense,mid rise apartment buildings of housing.
Sorry, but the financialization of housing is a real issue that needs to get addressed.
I’m pointing at ‘Build more fucking housing so I can afford to buy some’, I’m not sure why that appears to be so controversial.
Because you’re saying “don’t worry about the already built housing people sit on for short term rentals, those don’t count” they do count, there are a lot of them. How long would it take to build 9100 units in Toronto vs immediately dumpstering the airbnbs and forcing sale or long term rentals. There’s a part of the issue that you just might not be aware of, it’s the fucking vacant homes that sit there empty, making loads of cash during busy season.
You’re right, building more is good, but without bans on short term rentals and proper regulations around multi home ownership we’re just gonna build more units for landlords.
Not to mention, new buildings are excluded from rent control in Ontario.
Fuck that, in every sense. Why should the people already struggling for housing have to worry about landlords suddenly deciding to jack up rent by thousands, just so investors can have an easier go with AirBnB? That kind of expectation worsens a community, and absolutely contributes to the homelessness situation.
Nothing will make me support things like AirBnB at this point. People having homes should be more important.
without bans on short term rentals and proper regulations around multi home ownership we’re just gonna build more units for landlords.
I disagree. The main issue is lack of supply. Freeing up a few units here and there is merely providing a little short term relieve without doing anything to address the main issue. Get sufficient housing built, and the short term rental market wouldn’t be an issue.
You seem to completely disregard the fact that freeing up “a few units here and there” will have a material impact that lessens the need for immediate building of more houses in already overpopulated areas. I’m not saying, by any stretch, that we shouldn’t build but obfuscating the issue with another does not help. The short term rental market is an issue for a lot of people.
My dude. Go take econ 101. Supply and demand. If there are houses being sold to people that intend to use it for air BNB, then it is both reducing available supply, and increasing demand. When that happens , it drives up price. Families now have to bid against these investment chucklefucks. It’s not a scapegoat at all. The housing market has gotten to where it is for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to investors buying them for Airbnb. You can add in firms like Blackstone backed invitation homes also buying housing to be corporate landlords, the Fed keeping rates too low for too long allowing the people with the most assets to gain equity, and leverage themselves beyond what they’d normally do because money was essentially free for them. Add foreign buyers into the mix, and baby you’ve got a housing clusterfuck going. Our solution to everyone losing their houses in '08 was to let big firms buy houses and rent them out. No one can buy a house now, but man is the economy purring. If all these leeches lost their asses, and were forced to sell, we might return to affordability. Until then, you will own nothing and be happy.
They were never going to be big without breaking hotel regulations. It makes no sense why they’re big anyway. They don’t own any real estate. They should take 5% at most, like a payment processor.
It’s chokepoint capitalism, where you don’t supply, produce or consume, you just control the conduit through which people do those things.
Also though just owning property shouldn’t entitle you to an income. Fuck landlords in general, it’s just airbnb figured out a way to be even more exploitative.
Running an AirBNB is a lot more work than renting out a house. There’s cleaning and a lot more toiletries and furniture to buy. You probably clean the entire place more often than you clean your own house. You also have to communicate with the renters all the time and arrange to give them keys 10 times a month. Sometimes you do all that and the people cancel.
Stop trying to make “chokepoint capitalism” a thing. AirBNB doesn’t control prices on anything. Tourists determine what’s expensive with their dollars.
AirBnB are the chokepoint capitalists, not the owners.
And I’m so sorry you have to do actual work instead of just hoarding property. It must be tough when just having extra houses you don’t need isn’t enough anymore because chokepoint capitalists got in on your scam.
And supply & demand is completely unsupported by evidence. It is entirely an article of faith of orthodox economics.
- AirBNB is definitely not the only rental site out there. There are better, more specialized ones.
- I don’t have any rentals, I just know how much work they are. Can you find anything wrong with my description?
- Supply and demand is very easy to prove. Just go to any auction. The market clearing price is what someone will pay at the time.
You don’t have to be a monopoly to hold a chokepoint. The industry holds the chokepoint.
Your description was irrelevant, but also… cry me a fucking river. If they don’t like doing the work, maybe they could get some sort of agent to handle the tenants for them, and maybe the agent could get them to sign long term leases so they can vet them more carefully. Why not do that? Because that already exists and makes less money? Okay? Who cares? Jobs are work, here’s Tom with the weather.
Auctions suck for the most part, that’s why ebay mostly just sells things now. Look at the uproar when Uber does surge pricing. People don’t put up with it. Turns out that outside of a very few artificial situations like an auction, sellers basically just set prices, because unless they’ve specifically opted into an auction environment, consumers don’t put up with it.
Sellers can set prices, but for many things there are alternatives and hence more than one seller. Apple sets the iPhone prices, but you can substitute an Android pretty effectively, and there are multiple manufacturers of Android phones at lots of price points. If Apple decided to set the base price of an iPhone to 100k, people would not get mortgages, they’d buy a 500 dollar Android.
This holds true for lots of things, but housing is distorted by lots of factors. But housing doesn’t disprove supply and demand.
I am aware of the extremely simple story that you will learn in econ 101 - and sadly in more advanced courses as well.
It’s just that it’s only a theory. You should perhaps pay attention to the information you gave, and how you didn’t say, “observation of market behaviour bears out the supply & demand theory”, you just waved vaguely in the direction of a mechanism, with no reference to data.
If you look at the many studies into the matter where economists accidentally - and sometimes intentionally - did science on this, they found no actual data to support supply and demand as a model of pricing. It simply doesn’t hold true, and yet it’s taught constantly, and if you try to google this, you’ll just find publication after publication talking about the “law” of supply & demand. But it’s not a law, it is simply an assumption.
When looking at market behaviour and when talking to price setters, there is no data to support the theory, and nobody in the business pays attention to supply & demand. All the models that seem to work share the feature that they are set by the supply chain.
This article gathers the relevant information and has sources linked: https://strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflation/
Oh wow are the basic responsibilities of the thing ppl do voluntary tough? Maybe don’t do it then ya chokepoint capitalist.
What happened to Airbnb?
Good old corporate greed fueled by an unreasonable shareholders/investors expectations.
Also every single provider on airbnb is also an investor potentially looking to maximize their money. I say potentially because not all landlords are min/maxing entitled assholes.
When I’m on vacation, I don’t want to make time for chores. Airbnb wants to charge me a fee for cleaning and have me clean up.
And the horror stories of cameras, and stupid rules. No thanks. I’ll pay less at a motel and have breakfast included.
Air BnB has destroyed the property market in my town. I’d rather not travel than contribute to the problem.
I do still look for Airbnbs every time we travel because we’re a family of 5. Not a lot of hotels will accommodate 5 to a room and separate rooms means twice the price. Airbnb offers a lot more options for a family with the added benefits of a full kitchen and having a place that can actually be a short term home rather than a room with a bed.
Here’s the last one we rented: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/794199620391731129
I get that Airbnbs take some homes off the market and in some areas (like mine), that sucks because demand is high and supply is low. But they aren’t going to be the reason for a housing crunch. Here in Portland, Maine, we’re a small city on the ocean, thrive on tourists, have great restaurants, and are an easy drive to Boston or to ski resorts or Acadia. The housing market has been bonkers for YEARS and it isn’t going to change if we ban short term rentals.
False dichotomy. You can rent a villa, summer home, or any other non hotel accommodation outside of Airbnb. We used Booking.com for our last holiday, and the same place we rented was listed on Airbnb but more expensive by about a quarter of the price.
Of course you can, but those are still short term rentals, so I’m not quite sure what your point is. Mine was that short term rentals are good for some people and probably aren’t responsible for housing market problems.
Do hotels not provide an extra cot anymore?
Fire regulations for almost every hotel limits the room to 4. They’ll give you a crib but not another bed.
Ahhh, that sucks. I never realized just how tailored everything is to the ‘nuclear family’
There are places where we can all squeeze into a room, and we do. It all depends on the trip and what we’re looking to get out of it. We don’t mind sharing beds and putting someone on a sofa, but it’s harder as the kids are all getting into teen years.
“AirBNB is good because I had a bunch of kids but I don’t like paying a bunch of kid prices.”
OP was saying Airbnb still works for some people today despite the many complaints outlined in the article for users.
Weird take, but okay.
Maybe ‘a family of 5’ is two grandparents, two parents and one child. Or another combination. Why are you assuming it’s three or more children?
Maybe a big family vacation being a little cheaper for this poster is still a lesser priority to people having homes to own? We can just focus on the part where they want things cheaper for just them and not the makeup of the family.
That’s not relevant to what I was saying, which was there’s no reason to assume someone has a bunch of kids just because they’re traveling with five family members.
Buy a new condo and suddenly a bunch of weirdos turn up on weekends. It’s worse, because only managed properties can afford he units these days.
deleted by creator
I’d rather stay at a motel with full cleaning and amenities than some bozo’s house anyday. At a motel I can just focus on why I’m staying instead of how.
A lot of this anti air bnb stuff feels like astroturfing by hotels. Sure there are plenty of annoyances, but everyone I know still likes them even if they like to complain about them.
The society harm is a real thing though. companies buying up homes to rent them is a real problem. But these articles that treat airbnb like it’s so obvious that no one like them feel very artificial.
We had the chance to stay at an airbnb when our house was being worked on.
We found that most of the places around us were trying to compete with Hotels on price.
Which is fine. Except that the hotels had more/better amenities… for the same cost.
I can barely trust some rando to drive me around to a destination in the city. Why would I trust other randos to let me rent and use their house? And not break housing or safety laws in the process? It is 100x more complicated than just driving me from point A to point B.
Lots seem to trust Uber/Grab/Lyft or whatever to drive them around. I don’t think it’s that complicated.
That’s precisely what I was comparing it to. Transporting somebody in a car for 15 minutes is much different than providing housing, a bed, and a livable space for a week.
Neither are that difficult.
My circle has all turned on Airbnb. It’s a gamble. It used to be the gamble was worth it because it was cheaper than hotels, but now that they’re the same price, it’s not worth it.
Last time went great, the time before was not properly cleaned to guest standards, and they restained the wood walls in the kitchen so the whole place was permeated with an awful chemical smell that kept me from sleeping. At a hotel, you can just switch rooms if anything is suboptimal. At an air BNB, you’re stuck. Everyone in my circle has had half good half bad experiences and it’s just not worth risking your trip over.
Annoyances? The last time I used AirBNB, there was literally no HEAT in the unit we were staying in. Just because it was San Diego in February doesn’t make that legal. We left and got a hotel the next day and I had to fight with them to get a refund.
That’s the last time I ever used the service, and I used to be a regular.
