Our rental market is absolutely cut-throat right now. Affordable rentals on realtor.ca aren't lasting more than a couple days after they go up.
Airbnb changes the demand curve by letting residential zoned property be commercial short term rentals. It also doubles down by undermining actual hotels.
So you can react by saying just more houses. And I can react by saying “don’t do Airbnb, which is often illegal anyway.” We’re both right.
Capital shouldn’t have higher preference over citizens.
1 We had surplus housing. AirBnB would (probably) be fine from an availability perspective.
2 We have adequate housing. AirBnB would still not be good. A good portion of the available places for long term rent would be taken up by short term tenants and would drive up prices.
3 We have not enough housing. AirBnB same effects as 2, but even more so.
It seems to me that we live in situation 3. We need to build housing AND curb the excesses AirBnB. Just building more housing won't fix the problem. Just banning AirBnB won't suddenly give us an adequate housing supply.
What seems strange to me is the idea that tourists and small time local economic actors profiting handsomely from short term rentals should take priority over a majority of local citizens. If citizens don't like your plan, out your plan goes (very similar to how California residents keep killing upzoning).
If you're a local citizen and want to put a wrench in short term rentals, engage in the political process. Go to your representatives and tell them to enact legislation to do so if that's what you want, and if they won't you will assemble with other local citizen voters and vote them out. That's democracy.
It's also really unfavorable to be a landlord (at least in Ontario) as it's possible for a tenant to take up a lease and not pay for almost an entire year while you legally evict them. So I suppose it's understandable why people prefer to AirBNB their units, aside from making more money.
Really shitty situation all around.
But of course, who's going to pay for them and run them well? The nice thing about Airbnb is it created a competitive market, mechanisms to eliminate bad actors, customer service, price adjustments, insurance, and so on. You wouldn't get those things with a couple of hyper-efficient hotels. So it almost seems like we need the state to build the structure, and then allow people to bid on owning the rooms, and then renting them out on Airbnb. That way there could still be competition that drives all the useful features of Airbnb, but in a much more efficient form than the completely inefficient use of land that buying houses results in.
If landlords think short-term rentals are better for business than lease-based tenancy, then the amount of housing that would need to be built is much higher than demand.
Hopefully some regulation will be enacted as a result of this study but I won't hold my breath. Way too much money to be made by banks and RE agents in artificially restricting supply.
Are you ideologically against the right of private property in general, or only against the specific right to own houses?
Publish the actual paper or this is just vaporware nonsense. This is a non-peer-reviewed paper with zero credibility, thats been seen by a small handful of people. They could literally write a paper about the moon being made of cheese and have the same credibility. They dont even make the source material available in their article.
I dont want to sound overly critical, this looks like a legit finding that matches up with my experience of the housing market, but Im completely fed up with people publishing their "findings" without reporting where the data came from and how they got to their conclusions. Until they publish the paper, this should be dismissed out of hand. There's such a long history of people completely messing up their statistical methodology that you cant believe anything until you see the actual numbers/methods.
The lead author has said that the paper will be available for download tomorrow: https://twitter.com/dwachsmuth/status/1141665262065860608
The G&M article says it's a peer-reviewed study and fully funded by the federal government, so the likelihood of moon cheese methodology is low.
All right, all right, perhaps we can we have some respect for other professions around here?
You know the human world isn't the robot world, it's not built on 'data' it's built on relationships, agreements and good faith.
Even without the data it's not non-sense. It's a pretty rational hypothesis. Being rational definitely doesn't make something right, but it's about as far away from non-sense as you can get.
How can you possibly do that when you can't see the raw data and methodology yourself?
>In the past, Prof. Wachsmuth has done consulting work and produced reports for governments, and civic and business groups, including a hotel-industry association. This study, which has been peer reviewed, was funded solely by the federal government, however.
It's well accepted that the highway boom of twentieth century had a negative impact on city life. That's why the Big Dig put that city-cutting highway underground in Boston, and (one reason) why the viaduct in Seattle is going underground, and why the I-93 corridor in Massachusetts became a public transit route instead. Here's a longer list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
Transforming private residences into hotel rooms makes it easier to visit and harder to live. Acknowledging this doesn't mean people don't like Airbnb, it just means that both the positive and the negative impacts of their business model are being discussed.
In New York, for instance, Airbnb directly accounted for a US$380 increase in median annual rent costs, according to a separate report from Prof. Wachsmuth last year that was funded, in part, by a hotel-industry organization.
Coincidentally, I spoke with someone on the weekend who can't take it anymore and wants to sell their unit or put it to work as an AirBnb because of the amount of prostitutes, drug dealers, etc using the building as short term rentals through AirBnB.
Canada really needs to get a grip on foreign ownership. 10's - 100's of billions of capital outflows over the last decade from China, Hong Kong, Iran, etc have created a tough environment for the local population. Co-op's could possibly solve this problem by creating rules where short term rentals, foreign ownership, etc are not allowed. Although it's tough to get a mortgage for a co-op condo.
My neighbors airbnb their house every weekend. So nice loud music and rude guests to deal with fairly often. Of course why not? They are not accountable to rest of us full timers in my neighborhood.
My place was broken into by someone who stayed at it before using Airbnb.
One guest almost started a fire and had to be removed.
Checking in and out of airbnbs can be a bit of a nightmare. Everyone has their own process for checkin.
Airbnb destroying local real estate markets is no surprise. They've been doing it for several years and getting in trouble for it for several years.
Growth at all costs - no matter what it does to local markets or people's lives. I'm sure their impact on local economies is the least of their concern until the governments attached to those economies start to speak up.
I guess your experience may vary depending on what type of place you have and what type of owner of the unit. It’s really not hard to filter out the idiots with the review system.
The people who I have met waiting for the elevator were always super polite when I see them and our walls are thick enough with concrete where I don’t hear the music unless I’m close to my living room wall, which is far from my bedroom.
The owner of the unit, an older retiree from the area with just the one unit AFAIK, was very polite and open about it too and gave me his number in case I had any problems (which I’ve never used). But 99% of them seem to be European or Chinese travellers, who at most occasionally need some help with our complicated fob system. It’s only rarely young people who are partying and if it is it’s always the weekend where I’m more tolerant.
Plus I’ll never forget how Airbnb saved me when I flew into SF last minute as a 20yr old and the only option was a $500 hotel or not sleeping that night, because my prior arrangement with someone fell through when they were unexpectedly out of town. I was fortunate to find an Airbnb guy who accepted my request at 9pm after I got out of the BART with a dying phone. I was literally preparing to spend the night in a park with my luggage. So I’m a bit biased regarding Airbnb and the alternate options without it (which no one seems to offer or care about in their calls to ban it).
that's undeniably true for all property in most places that have any tourism value, but it's a short-term value akin to "if we light this city on fire, we can probably make a lot of money selling tickets to watch it".
People also have to live in the city for it to have any value as a tourism destination. If an apartment can host a hundred visitors a year but there's no service industry staff living within 50km because all their houses have been converted to AirBnB's, your tourism industry is going to collapse.
Real estate isn't really that controlled by market forces. Its a means to an end and pricing does not actually represent best utility.
I agree in part and disagree in part. I do think that regulatory arbitrage is part of what makes Airbnb, Uber, et al valuable. I don't think it's the exclusive source of their margins. They generate a lot of value through creating a liquid 2-sided market.
Too bad this has to remain a fantasy. https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/urban-sprawl-housin...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/443063/number-of-immigra...
It's perfectly possible for immigration to be a net positive for the economy and for it to have negative affects on the availability of housing.
Rallying against AirBnB is so silly -- no matter how you slice it it's always a minor factor in self-inflicted "housing crisis" scenarios.
- Crappy local policy prevents creation of 300,000 housing units: nobody panicks.
- Startup removes 30,000 housing units from the market: everyone loses their mind!
I had to stop here.
1. It is not always the case but that person (fortunately) has the freedom to choose another location.
2. Guarantees don't really exist unless you are talking physics theory and even that sometimes surprises people.
> much more money is to be made with Airbnb, because people who are staying for 5 days pay rates that are was higher than the typical yearly rental fee for the same place.
You made my original point. This transaction is a win-win for both parties involved.
The rest of your argument centers around stifling this transaction to subsidize an artificial-non-sustainable market.
Yes, this effects real people in real ways but they need to take _personal_ action and do what's best for them personally instead of effecting change on the rest of the area.
I have a basement apartment that my friend rents out and when he goes on trips he rents it out. If he leaves I would consider AirBnB even if long term because it would save me a lot of trouble.
> It vastly differs from how Airbnb often pitches itself: as a personal platform through which residents, either out of town or looking to put a second bedroom to good use, will occasionally rent out their spaces.
> Often, the largest “hosts” are in fact businesses that manage vacation rentals on behalf of homeowners.
City of Vancouver regulations (as ineffective as they are) explicitly targeted and banned these sort of commercial operators.
What does Airbnb's valuation look like if such a significant share of their revenue comes from the sort of activity that is actively being banned by more and more cities?
A person can make substantially more money renting short term to a tourist than they can to a long term tenant, so accordingly the land valuation is less and less based on the underlying assumption of land being rented long term to a person that can only afford what a local income provides.
Those flats on Airbnb have to come from somewhere and there are rental agencies that specialise in managing properties exclusively for Airbnb, none of this existed before and some of those properties were taken from the long let market, which would drive prices up.
For the record, I'd almost say increased tourism in most places isn't a net positive.
AirBnB properties were originally zoned for long-term housing and operate as not-long-term housing.
