It seems unconscionable to rent an apartment from a landlord and then use the space to run a hotel. Anybody who's ever rented more than one apartment knows that landlords are picky about tenants, often requiring credit checks as well as references from previous landlords. Renters sign a binding agreement with their landlord stipulating that they're using the space as their private residence. Breaking that agreement for profit is unethical.
In one place I went, they wanted 450$ for "application fee and credit check", and it was not even a luxury apartment, wasn't in Manhattan or any high rent place.
I am not defending any party here - just pointing out, noone in this mess is totally ethical.
I don't care for it myself.
Way to go on painting every single landlord as greedy bastards who care about nothing other than squeezing every single penny out of the tenant based on your own personal limited experience. Don't be so quick to generalize that all landlords are slumlords. For every story of landlord abuse, there is one for tenants who take advantage of the system as well.
For 18 months (till April) I lived at 16 Waverly Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. I never signed a lease. The landlord did not care about a thing, so long as I paid the rent on the time. In that building, sub-letting apartments is common. The landlord is an older Hasidic Jewish gentleman, and his attitude toward renters is fairly common among the Jewish landlords who own a large chunk of the southern Williamsburg neighborhood. In all of these buildings, the tendency is toward laissez faire. This cuts both ways: the landlord lets you do anything, but the landlord rarely fixes anything that you need fixed. For a particular type of person (like me) this seems like a reasonable trade-off. And in such circumstances, it is perfectly reasonable for renters to find sub-letters.
Of course it is. There was another story about a tenant in NY getting sued after his landlord started renting out apartments.
But it is also true that your lease could allow you to sublet with an AirBnB type arrangement, so for AirBnB they probably have you sign up saying "Yes, I am allowed to do this." and leave it up to the participants to be legal and if they aren't having the landlord deal with it.
A number of stories we have yet to hear are "AirBnB got me kicked out of my apartment." or "I was arrested sued by a hotel chain." kinds of stories. I think of them as the sounds of disruption. Basically they have created a market, very much like eBay created a market, or Craigslist, and suddenly there are commerce opportunities that didn't exist before, combined with a tight economy and poof, disruption.
I just received a notice of termination from my landlord in the mail. It states that I am violating my lease by using my apartment as a hotel/bed and breakfast and that I have two weeks to move out. As evidence, they included my airbnb posting and the two reviews I received from the two people who stayed in my apartment (one for two nights and one for five nights). The apartment is not rent stabilized and I have lived here for two years, always paying my rent on time. I don't know if it is legal that they are trying to kick me out of my apartment with two weeks notice, and I don't know if they can use my airbnb posting as proof. I'm going to see a lawyer this week.
I mean, if these apartments were being advertised on craigslist or local classifieds would you think they need to deal with it?
But I'm not saying Airbnb "needs" to deal with it. I'm saying they "should" decline listings from people who don't own their property absent some documentation of consent from the landlord of that property.
Everyone who runs a Bed and Breakfast business from their home? (In the UK this sector is huge).
What is the incentive for Airbnb to check? Even assuming most listers do have the legal right to do so, checking in a way that isn't easily gamed would be time-consuming and expensive. It's pretty obvious why they don't do that; it would put them out of business.
Was this a rhetorical question meant to make the point "Airbnb is bad"?
I think Airbnb has no incentive right now to try to ensure that listings are legitimate or authorized, and that that's a problem.
The rest of your post stands, though - landlords have a valid concern for the condition of the apartment, disruption of other tenants, &c.
And I'll be in SF in 2 weeks for Google IO, also staying with an AirBnB host. Not the kind of article I want to read before flying out there :-)
If you want references for property owners in San Fran or near by who have their properties listed on AirBnB, drop me a line.
Not mentioned is if they tried to talk to their neighbour.
Was the neighbor who had control of the unit as a tenant on the lease home when the room was rented out? I don't think so. The article opens with these paragraphs:
"First came the noisy upstairs neighbors who said they were just "renting the place for a couple of nights" but refused to tone it down. Then came the people who would try to open the front door of the Castro/Duboce Triangle apartment where Barnaby Thieme and Rebecca Reagan live, saying they thought it led to the lobby.
"The couple looked online and discovered what was behind the disruptions - a unit in their building was being rented out through Airbnb, the marketplace for short-term housing in private residences."
I read that as saying that the couple who were disturbed by Airbnb visitors DID talk to those visitors, only to find out that they weren't actual tenants of the building. The person putting the unit up for short-term stays on Airbnb doesn't seem to have been available.
AFTER EDIT: A top-level comment that came in since I posted this makes an interesting point:
I admire the optimism that youth brings, allowing someone to look at a problem with a fresh perspective but all too often, the rules, laws and regulations in place that make the old way of doing business so boring and hard are actually in place for a very good reason.
This is usually how the law (and business custom) develops, by encountering actual human behavior. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." The Common Law (1881), p. 1.
They need to talk to the person the visitors are renting from. Is that doesn't work, they can go one level higher up.
The prices are insane. I paid 3300USD for a shitty studio in China Town for a month.
I am ok with paying a lot of money for a place and I know NY well enough to know it's expensive.
But people who get only profit from subletting and pumping up the prices by a factor 2x-3x should not be allowed onto the platform.
Of course Airbnb don't really care because they get a percentage of the transaction.
So great idea but pretty shitty service at least in NY.
I know, it's not the same as living in the city, and perhaps you wanted that experience as well. But not sure if the Chinatown Studio gave you the experience you were looking for.
Hopefully I found that yesterday :)
Will have to get approved (again an issue when you don't have credit history as the US works opposite of Denmark in that regard)
Secondly, Airbnb does have plenty of shared places in Queens and Brooklyn that go for less than seventy bucks a day, and studios that would be closer to 2k.
There are many places on AirBnB that have simply pumped up the prices to make a living and since there is not negative feedback mechanism everyone just charges more and more.
Craigslist yeah i tried that, i enden up with mostly scams and bait and switch guys.
Support line dealing with complaints from neighbors? How messy and resource intensive.
Meeting with local community leaders and the public to discuss the issues surrounding their service? That doesn't scale very well and is again ... messy, boring and hard.
In other words, a fantastic way to build barriers to entry and really lock up a new industry.
Most internet startups have low or no barriers to entry, so they can get an idea off the ground really quickly.
{{citation needed}}
I can just as easily say that "the rules, laws and regulations in place that make the old way of doing business so boring and hard are actually in place because of corruption, greed, nepotism, and/or incompetence and are universally immoral, unjust and should be ignored".
And on a semi-related note... did anybody else notice how the phrase "scarce rental housing" kept cropping up in that article? Hmmm... so if there is actually demand for more long-term rental housing, and that demand is not being met, I'd bet money that the primary reason is drumroll please government interference. And I'd be strongly tempted to suspect that said interference has it's root in more corrupted relationships involving the local government and powerful special interests.
San Francisco has also made it virtually impossible to build new housing units (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...). If the city needs more housing stock, there's an advanced, information-age technology called the "elevator" that can allow it to build a very large number of housing units on a very small amount of land.
tl;dr: "We like Airbnb when others are potentially inconvenienced to our benefit, but not the other way around."
I'm guessing the insurance companies find a way to avoid covering you if you let a tenant sublet their apartment hotel-style... if for no other reason than I'd bet policies for hotels are more expensive than residences. (And hotels have to have better fire protection, etc.)
Taxes and laws are a totally different beast here.
And yes, I agree it does take away units that would otherwise have been used for long-term renting, robbing the rental market of stock. NYC has about a 1% vacancy rate as it is.
AirBnb is going to see a huge litigation storm coming its way if it doesnt take more of a proactive approach where local law does not allow such rentals.
