 | | Airbnb removed my positive review and accused me of being in cahoots with the host to leave positive feedback. They said they have found an existing relationship between me and the host. Mind you have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb, I’m from USA and this was in Medellin Colombia, I usually stay at Marriott hotels and I only went with Airbnb because the girl I traveled with suggested using it because it was cheaper. It was awesome place, host was great, so left a fantastic review. It was taken down and I was called a liar. When I asked to speak with someone about why I’m accused of being a liar in my review customer support promised me many times I would get a call back. Never once did I receive a call back from anyone at Airbnb instead I would get an email that they had conducted a thorough review and their position still stands that I am a liar. I’m not sure what thorough means in their mind but since they asked me zero questions or confirmed no information with me directly it’s impossible that they conducted any kind of thorough review. Airbnb is a horrendous company along with all of these gig economy companies. They need to be regulated in the same manner as they’re non-gig counterparts are. I can’t imagine that any Airbnb executive actually stays at Airbnb places not with the kind of customer service that Airbnb offers. |
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| | This is why I went back to hotels. Airbnb is a scummy company and can’t seem to survive without out of control “gotcha” fees added by either itself or its hosts which now make many hotels cheaper. I also am not obligated to do work for the host with a hotel. Some of the hosts have become super entitled over the years due to Airbnbs policies. It’s a shame as using Airbnb was an excellent experience when it first began but that obviously was on borrowed time much like the rest of the gig economy. |
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| | I’ve stayed in 100+ Airbnbs and literally never have paid or been asked to pay an extra fee. I have, however, been surprised several times by hotels charging an extra “resort fee” upon arrival. |
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| | I was inclined to say “speak for yourself”, but then that would have been rude and your username indicates we are living half way across the planet. Things are different on this side of earth, rest assured.
I have paid extra every single time. Further, there is always things like “parking available”, but then either its not free of charge or always busy or its….public parkings. Same with internet access. Available, if you pay and if its tourism months.
And the internet you get comes from a router in the hallway and is shared and at times it seemed like it has the capacity for one concurrent user. Airbnb enables hosts to publish such things in the name of revenue. But if a host gets in trouble, they have a half arsed wannabe collection team which will drop them like a hot potato soon. There are no reviews of truthfulness of the offers etc. If you have had a good experience, then irs thanks to the host, not thanks to airbnb. |
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| | I have also found some Airbnb ads to be inaccurate. Online descriptions and reviews should be more regulated. Google, for instance, keeps removing legitimate reviews from myself and others regarding a builder that rented / sold houses with horrible snagging problems, e.g. bursting pipes and leaky roofs. |
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| | I’ve always refused to pay the resort fee and only a single time has the hotel not caved. Course this only works if the hotel isn’t sold out. I tell them its a separate service because not everyone uses it. So if I am not using say the pool or the gym then I shouldn’t have to pay it. The single time I paid the fee was when it included Internet service which I needed. I wrote the CEO of the chain after my stay arguing that charging extra for Internet is like charging extra for electricity or water. Never received a reply. |
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| | Ya we got charged a mandatory 20-30$ a day fee at a hotel recently for their “arcade”, which was 2 pinball machines.., and “bar“, which was a mini fridge in the lobby… (1 “free” drink a day). |
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| | These are so egregious and can be 50% of a night cost. I’ve had so many bad experiences with Airbnb. It’s never like in the pictures. It’s always noisier, low quality mattress and furniture that looks good on pictures but isn’t functional or breaks if you touch it. I also feel like I’m living in ikea showrooms around the world. And given how expensive the cleaning is, it’s rarely passably clean. Moldy corners in the bathroom, dirt under the bed, chipped dishes… And good luck trying to get Airbnb to help you. Best they can usually do (after you explain your case over from scratch because it’s always a new customer service person) is “alright we’ll check you out, you get a refund, and good luck finding a place for tonight out of pocket” Never again. It’s hotels for me every time as well. |
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| | Not the OP, but at least in my jurisdiction (Norway), AirBnB dutifully lists any cleaning fees before I press the ‘confirm booking’ button. I think the point was ‘No -surprise- fees. |
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| | They clearly meant a surprise fee, from context. The AirBnB cleaning fee is expected and already included in your bill. Edit: top context is “That is against AirBnB rules” and “refunded” i.e. AirBnB has explicit rules against surprise fees or bonds, and it can enforce rules. I am guessing you just responded quickly but it is always good to spend time to try to “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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| | I think you’re guilty of what you’re accusing the responder with. The exorbitance of a $200+ cleaning fee is a well-known criticism of Airbnb. And no, not until recently could you see the actual total prior to sunken cost of Reviewing your booking. That too, Airbnb finally implemented once the Biden administration compelled them by law – that is, not before making much fanfare about it with the pretense of them “doing it for the customers” |
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| | $200 isn’t even that large of a cleaning fee by AirBnb standards (i’d say that closer to the median for a full home in the markets I travel in). The last 3 bedroom home I rented on AirBnb had a $500 cleaning fee. We were there 4 days. Its ridiculous, but it’s becoming the standard on AirBnb. |
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| | It is not the hotels, who charge it, but governments, most often the municipality. Usually there is no obligation to hide that from the guest or include it in the price. Just to pay. You can also go pay it straight in the town hall, the hotel is just doing you a favor. |
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| | A resort fee is not the same as a tourism tax. Tourism taxes are per head, per night and generally Airbnbs are required to charge them as well (though they often don’t). A resort fee is a bogus surcharge added by hotels to “cover” advertised amenities, like if a cinema charged you a Dolby Surround fee after you showed your ticket at the entrance. |
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| | The latest scam is having to pay either a $1500 deposit, or $59 “deposit insurance”, which I assume the host gets some kickback on. I know I’m not going to trash the place. But I also don’t like just putting $1500 out there either. A deposit that high only exists so someone can make money off the deposit insurance. |
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| | I was already losing satisfaction in AirBnb but have been open to it if traveling companions were into it. But the nail in the coffin is these deposits. The last few AirBnBs that I have vetted have had these $1,000+ deposits. There was even one I found that had $2,500 deposit (granted it was a large house). I can stay at a 5 star hotel for a $50 deposit on my credit card. I’ll just do that instead. Like you said, its not even really about tying up the money either. I would put this on my AMEX which has no credit limit, so tying up $1,500 isn’t really the problem, its the need to authorize a host that I don’t personally trust to be able to make any claim they want to justify keeping part of that deposit. I have much more trust in Marriott or Hilton and they only need $50. In all the traveling I’ve done, I’ve never had them refuse to release a deposit in full. By contrast, I’ve met enough crazy AirBnb hosts, that i wouldn’t trust them with $100, let along $2,500. Cleaning fees are also ridiculous. I’ve seen a lot of $500+ cleaning fees. Come on! What kind of cleaning are you doing for $500?! I don’t really care. If people want to go to AirBnbs, then great. I’ve had some good experiences with them, but i’ve also had several bad ones. I don’t like the risk I need to take each time with the host. I also am getting fed up with the calculating the “real cost” for each one when comparing them. I’d rather go to Marriott or Hilton where they treat me like a God. So I’m basically done with AirBnb at this point. |
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| | They, speaking of the hosts, do not make anythong from deposits, I am working in finance, rest assured the reason is a different, much more nefarious one. They want to charge you for potential damages, done by you or not, as well as wear and tear. Never, ever put a deposit for them, not even by credit card. And if you pay for the stay, always , always use a credit card, not a debit card.
That way, you can pull the chargeback trigger on them. A chargeback is their worst nightmare, trust me, it can have so many implications and hurt airbnb so badly if they are subject to chargebacks. |
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| | > And if you pay for the stay, always , always use a credit card, not a debit card. That way, you can pull the chargeback trigger on them. You can chargeback with a debit card, I’ve done it a few times myself. |
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| | It forced hotels to have more competitive prices. Honestly, there was not much else it could do in the long term. |
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| | This is sort of a funny argument. I promise that AirBNB prices have no impact or influence on hotel prices. It is generally the opposite, AirBnB rates are often influenced by the prices of surrounding hotels. The number of travelers staying at an Airbnb versus a hotel is under 1%. This is clear by looking at overall inventory available. Even a decent market _might_ have 100 AirBnB listings, that same market will have several thousands (possible 10,000+) of hotel rooms. Generally the opposite is true. AirBnb hosts will justify their nightly rate based on comparable hotels in the area. But the average Marriot for example isn’t all that worried about the handful of AirBnbs nearby that they might be losing customers to. |
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| | It did not. Booking.com did that. I do however always choose an apartment for corporate trips, but always via booking.com. |
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| | To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. There’s no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist. Personally, I want to know people’s great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn’t!? But, once you tie it to money, it’s over. |
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| | It is a problem, but it’s also partially self-inflicted. Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You’ll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text. Airbnb’s reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated. Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system. |
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| | You can also only review an Airbnb once you have stayed within. Difference of opinion, I do not find the game examples would be relevant or safe to disclose in the scope of an Airbnb review. |
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| | It seems like Airbnb is doing the gamification and manipulating it as well. I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves. As soon as some reviews get promoted and others hidden I stop paying attention to them |
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| | > I’d rather all reviews stay, good and bad and let the consumer decide for themselves That’s not a realistic solution. If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it’s just the property’s friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there’s no way it’s 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i’ll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best. Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process. |
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| | Is there anything currently in place that prevents the 5% off situation? Seems like nobody is able to solve that one. Or wants to tackle it. Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties – it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest. |
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| | I left a negative review on a product on Amazon whose seller was doing this (but much higher than 5%). Amazon deleted the review. |
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| | I wish I could post the review on my own site and users could easily discover it when browsing items. That makes me develop and risk a reputation. I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud. If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake. Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc. |
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| | You should also be able to give extra weight to reviewers that broadly line up with your own reviews. That way; the things that are important to you will show up. It also incentivises you to leave honest reviews. |
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| | In my mental lazy file there’s a company called antipode that is able to find people with opposite and like reviews and can help people identify and avoid items. So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc. |
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| | > To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale. This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable. |
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| | > To be fair, gamifcation of reviews is a very real problem. I wonder if “tipping” could improve things. A new platform like airbnb could have an expected tip built in to the platform. Hosts are expected to provide good service and get a tip. Customers are encouraged to tip at the end of their stay (with a lower base price than airbnb to account for that). Hosts can see the average, median, max, and min tips of potential customers (along with distribution, and percentage calculations) and use that to determine whether to accept them as a guest. Customers can see the average tip a listing received, and use that to determine if they’d want to stay there. Of course, they would sometimes leave $0 or a low number as a tip, but they’d be incentivized to also provide good tips for good service, because a low tip average would reflect poorly on them and make them less likely to be hosted. I suspect tying things to real value for the customer and host would lead to better service and a more honest indication of host/customer quality. But perhaps it would just lead to hosts literally bribing customers for good tips. |
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| | Do you then also get ran after you when you don’t leave a tip on top of the service fee the restaurant charges? Pretty crazy experience that was in the USA |
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| | Oh god please no more tipping. It’s spreading like a virus. Each time I visit the USA there’s more pestering for tips from every possible angle. Just pay people a fair wage already. |
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| | I don’t mind tipping, as it incentivizes people to perform better than standard work. I can’t see being forced to pay 20% to someone that can bring food on time for instance. Either way, this is Airbnb, the owner of the property sets the “wage”. |
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| | This is the correct stance to take. I’ve been to other countries where tipping hasn’t been implemented, and the service and quality has _always_ been worse than in the grand USA. |
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| | Last thing we need is more adoption of tipping which leads to oassive aggressiveness around the event |
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| | Personally I hate tipping. Long term it just makes everyone frustrated. Socially, it used to be 10% now the bare minimum is 15% if give 18% people then people start becoming happy. Now I’m forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list… |
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| | > Now I’m forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list… If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns. |
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| | > You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however. The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer. The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose. Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture. |
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| | That’s true. Another reality is that there are bad actors on the customer side too. A single person who gets off on being awful to people can leave an unwarranted bad review and materially harm an Airbnb host’s business. |
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| | > have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb See what happens if you ask a bank for a loan with no credit history. Of course these are only tangentially alike, but public history is an important way to distinguish organic reviews from AstroTurf. |
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| | Since when is a social media account required to do online business? You also don’t need a social account to login, so how would Airbnb even know that user named “John Smith” on Twitter is you? |
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| | I feel like, the reason is in the text in itself and the ML software flagged it, because it’s to similar to fake reviews.. |
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| | Californians can opt out but you have to go to every company and there are dozens. Start with the big ones like Acxiom and Bluekai. Many of them collect their data via third-party scripts so you should ensure those are blocked. |
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| | Don’t exaggerate. There is a difference between doing online business and leaving an optional review. OP was still able to use Airbnb, they just removed one positive review possibly because they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet. |
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| | I’m not the same person, and the question still applies. If you’re so pedantic, then, > Since when is a social media account required to leave reviews? It’s just as absurd when written this way. But, please, show me the exact place where Airbnb (or any other big company) says that a social media presence is required to leave a review. I’m waiting. |
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| | Show me where Airbnb promises to accept every review? I’m waiting. Edit: furthermore spam prevention takes all sorts of random signals in to account. Having no online presence other than a single stay in Airbnb certainly looks suspicious. Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy. |
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| | What indication do you have that such a policy is even remotely in use at Airbnb or another company? Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy, but there is also no evidence whatsoever that social media presence was in any way shape or form used to make the decision here. Airbnb at no point mentioned it, nor would it have been something that crossed your mind if original commenter didn’t mention it as a fact about themselves. |
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| | Maybe we’re aggresively agreeing with eachother? I’m not arguing that Airbnb does use presence/lack of social to make a decision here. I just objected to you saying > Since when is a social media account required to do online business? I interpreted that as you being outraged that Airbnb requires some form of social presence to do business. I felt you were exaggerating and responded by saying its just about the review. I meant that even _if_ Airbnb is checking this, it’s not a big deal cause this is just one of many signals that could feed into spam detection and we’re only talking about the _review_ not the ability to use Airbnb at all. You raised a valid point earlier, I doubt they’re actually checking this, my point is just that even if they are, who cares. OP looks suspicious by having no online presence at all and only one stay on Airbnb. That combined with the language in their review probably tipped the spam filters to say “hey it’s probably safer if we don’t let this review through, doesn’t seem legit” |
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| | > they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet Huh? Airbnb has the entire transaction history that matters – proving that this specific user paid a specific amount of money for staying in a specific place for a specific amount of time. Thinking that you need to prove “online history” (how would you even track this?) as well is absurd. My theory on this is the same as usual – Airbnb outsources or understaffs their customer service department as usual; some stressed out agent closed the case without even looking at it. Making some noise and opening a separate case will probably work if you’re bothered enough. |
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| | Yeah, but I don’t think Airbnb has sophisticated enough infrastructure to figure out if every person leaving a review has an online presence before deleting their review. It’s possible there’s something more mundane, like not having a browser cookie when the review was left or something like that. |
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| | Indeed. It’s easy enough to funnel the money back to somebody you know, paying the 3% commission to Airbnb. There are probably tax ramifications too but as a business cost for a glowing review with no effort, worth it. |
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| | Weird part about this is that, at least when I onboarded, Airbnb made me do ID verification to make sure I wasn’t a bot or a puppet. After that, they’ve already made the fees on the stay. Most people won’t be losing 20% or whatever to farm good reviews. Why would the final and optional review step be the part where they decide to verify if the stranger staying in someone else’s house is a real person. |
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| | It sounds like they suspected you’re in cahoots with the host. They don’t need to verify that you are in cahoots or not for booking, if a host wants to put themselves then whatever, but if the review looks supisiocus they’ll delete it. |
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| | >they have no online history making it hard to distinguish them from a bot or puppet. Implying that a “bot” or “puppet” is paying to stay at AirBnB’s just so they can write salty reviews? |
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| | Yes this is exactly what they do, and what happens with many Amazon items as well, and for Booking.com It is not really a big cost because you only really need to pay the platform fee (you control both sides of the transaction do the only real cost is the middleman). Reviews are super important and it is hard to get booking when you have 0 reviews so it is not surprising that some hosts would spend some dollars for 3-4 fake positive reviews to kickstart their property (many people will bounce off the ad without at least a couple positive reviews, so it changes your business radically) |
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| | Except you are describing the opposite of what is being done. Not positive reviews, but negative reviews. I can certainly see astroturfing your own properties with great reviews, but negative ones? That is a situation where you do not control both sides of the transaction, so a high price to pay to put a “fake” negative review on a property! |
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| | In the case I commented on they left a positive review. I’m sure many hosts will accept the Airbnb fees once to boost their rating. Especially if they’re starting out, early reviews carry more weight. |
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| | You’re not wrong. However, if a company uses my presense (or lack of) on social media as a way to make judgements I will not give them a penny of business. |
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| | It’s important to note that they were happy taking money from Guests. It’s only the reviews they’re blocking. Reviews are an auxiliary cost to Airbnb. They need moderating and their Hosts complain and use up support time if bad reviews are let through. I suggest profiling users is a quick and cheap way they’ve done the sums on to weed out the easiest level of abuse (on both sides). They’re not going to lose any business until it affects you. |
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| | They mentioned not having social media accounts to show that AirBnB couldn’t have any information about them or them being related to the host. (OTOH, their namesake may have a social media account and that may be linked to the host. In theory.) |
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| | A lot of moderation is made to sound more certain than it is. “We have a suspicion based on this data we don’t have that you might not be a real customer so we’re blocking your reviews” invites a whole lot more customer support time than “We’re not accepting your reviews.” It is simply cheaper to be firm, however unfair it is when they get it wrong. |
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| | I’m confused, you think AirBnB should pay random people as employees to let them host short-term stays in their house? And this will help make AirBnB’s moderation of reviews more honest? |
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| | How exactly do you regulate it like hotels without changing the legal structure? Hotels either directly run their various locations (aka run by their employees) or franchise it. That’s a totally different business model. So just saying “regulate it like hotels” doesn’t mean much. |
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| | You would do it by changing the legal structure, but not by requiring any employees of Airbnb to manage the properties themselves, any more so than TripAdvisor employees manage hotels today. Require Airbnb hosts to pay for a license, have regular inspections, etc. |
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| | Right, so you’re not regulating AirBnB directly really, you’re regulating the local AirBnB hosts. And how does this help with reviews on airbnb.com? |
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| | the idea of a secret shopper is common. i suspect abnb already does this. obviously they get extremely limited coverage if they do so |
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| | Why do you care so intensely about this? Edit: I should have expanded on my post a bit. It’s quite obvious that the review was flagged by some ML model, most likely not because the reviewer is a liar but probably because the host has a high prior for shenanigans. Combined with the lack of social signals for the reviewer, I could see why an ML model might be overzealous. But back to my original question: nobody is being called a liar, why take it so personally? |
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| | Because a huge amount of value in AirBnB is its reviews. That’s how you’re supposed to know where is worth staying and where isn’t. If those can’t be trusted, then it’s an inferior B&B platform with doctored reviews that you can’t trust. My advice to those reading this is just to get a hotel unless there is no alternative. AirBnB was fine for a bit when it was cheaper than alternatives, but, in my experience, it’s now as expensive (if not more) as the hotels they’re trying to replace. There’s usually a massively inferior experience when compared to Hotels the majority of the time. At least, that’s been my experience. |
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| | > Because a huge amount of value in AirBnB is its reviews. Reviews that you can’t leave unless other party reviewed you which self censors whenever there’s a slightest disagreement See reviews for same places on booking.com and they are consistently 1 star less |
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| | Why don’t you? Our economy is becoming increasingly intermediated and employees are increasingly losing their rights (and access to basic services like healthcare) by being mislabeled as contractors. There’s a myriad of issues with affordability in the housing market and AirBnB exacerbates them. |
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| | I imagine being indirectly or directly called a liar/fraudster by a giant multinational is personally upsetting to the parent poster. |
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| | “Indirectly” is likely an understatement. I doubt at any point airbnb called this person a “liar”, that’s just their own interpretation of events |
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| | For me, reviews are a primary parameter when selecting a “thing” from “a platform”. So when I experience that the platform is manipulating the reviews, I not only feel manipulated (maybe all previous times I overpayed, missed opportunities etc?) but I feel that what we all do know: we are there only to make that platform a nice revenue; it doesn’t care about giving it’s users the best value, it only cares about it’s bottom-lines, which apparently don’t align with my needs. |
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| | You can always book a hotel. AirBNB will not and cannot provide you a 100% care free experience because some guests are indeed liars and there are all sorts of scams both on the guest and host side. It’s a kind of ebay. It’s always a hit or miss. |
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| | Perhaps they rely on some flawed signals to make their decisions such how many positive reviews you have (the buyer) vs seller’s reviews(i.e who is more likely to lie). There could also be bad faith from Airbnb as some comments frame it but I believe most of the time it’s just a tricky business. Check ebay and you see the same issues or even worse. |
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| | I’d much rather have one legit review removed for every 20 fake one, rather than have to wade through 20 fake reviews just to find a single authentic one. |
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| | There is an old joke, how do you know that someone is a vegan or does crossfit? You’ll know because they’ll make sure you know minutes after meeting them. In 2008-2011 on HN if someone worked at facebook you knew because they mentioned it so often. Now you never hear anyone saying they work for Facebook because of all the negative externalities that Facebook and Instagram have had on the world that no one wants to be associated with them. AirBnB is now in a similar situation. When tehy first came out you would get lots of positive feedback from people about their service. now that they allow whole home rentals and people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market people have a far different opinion of the company. Couple that with hosts are squeezing people with 100’s of dollars in cleaning and other fees that dwarf the nightly rental costs. Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely. You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets. Charitably I guess you could say that every company falls victim to the saying “You Either Die A Hero Or Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain.” |
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| | To be fair, housing and rental markets in some places are kind of pre-ruined. There have been plenty of (and doubtless will be plenty more) scammy landlords for short-term rentals. AirBnB really just provided a modern online interface with some customer service stuff that papered over the bad stuff for a while. But like with actual bad construction, you can’t hide the stuff forever so sooner or later the magic disappears. |
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| | A lot of the macrolevel complaints about Airbnb are trotted out because customers had shitty experiences. I still bring up their douchey bus ads in sf bragging about finally paying their taxes after years of dodging then not because that campaign directly effected me but because I have been personally burned by the company a few times and this anecdote helps communicate the global nature of the problem with the company culture that a few bad stays doesn’t always convey. |
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| | Well, they’re ruined because of zoning (and tax law but that’s a whole other story) In theory zoning is supposed be in residents interest to stop things like fracking from happening next to playgrounds (it doesn’t but again that’s another story). Cities follow zoning law to the letter when it comes to new apartments. Airbnb repurposes residential zoned property as commerical hotels. If we’re going to take zoning seriously this shouldn’t be allowed. |
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| | AirBnB sux but zoning has arguably been a net negative on most societies in many ways https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o for me what I noticed lately is that in California it’s impossible to have a quiet modern apartment because nearly 100% of modern apartment buildings are only allowed to be built on busy noisy high traffic streets. If you want a quiet street you’re forced to buy/rent a house |
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| | Is it possible to build proper noise insulation, which makes the house as quiet as the a house in a quiet neignorhood, to a newly built, modern apartment house? I think it is, but construction companies are trying to savd a few cents, and they don’t add proper noise insulation. |
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| | Where I live the zoning laws require better noise isolation for new builds on major roads, because this is such an easy way for investors to save money and screw tenants. |
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| | Where exactly in CA? I live in an apartment on a quiet street and the worst noise problem I have is the upstairs neighbors have a heavy dog that likes to jump around. |
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| | Not true in SF. Plenty of apartments are on streets that are not main thoroughfares. In fact busy streets are often primarily zoned commercial |
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| | Name any apartment complex on a quiet street in SF that’s not in Mission Bay that’s been built in the last 15 years |
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| | 100% agree. But if we take zoning seriously when it comes to new apartments then we should take it seriously when it comes to Airbnb. |
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| | Comparing it to a commercial hotel isn’t really accurate. It’s more like a bed and breakfast. Size of the property matters a lot. |
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| | In every city there are multiple hosts who buy/rent out entire apartment complexes and turn them into AirBnBs. That’s a hotel, not a bed and breakfast. |
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| | I’ve seen all the comments about cleaning fees but didn’t really believe it until I was looking for a place to spend March break; it’s completely ridiculous! How is it that they aren’t capped as a % of nightly cost? This is like the outrageous shipping costs of old eBay. |
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| | We had a place booked on Airbnb near the end of the summer. Had a deposit paid, and the overall price was a bit steep, but needed to stay in the city at that time. Three weeks out we get an email with the “house rules” including disclosing that the owner would actually be staying in the house and would need to go through the main bedroom to enter and exit the property. We were contemplating what to do with this information as the listing is under “entire place” when a few days later we got an email from Airbnb saying that there was a price adjustment of +$395 for cleaning PER DAY. We had it booked for 5 days so we needed to pay an additional $~2000. That was more than double the original cost. Thankfully we were able to cancel and get our deposit back with just the automated cancellation, but we did get a nasty message from the host that we we reported back to Airbnb. |
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| | Because an Airbnb listing is cleaned every time a new guest checks in, it doesn’t matter whether you stay for one night only or 10 nights. It’s a fixed cost to the host. |
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| | How much cleaning fee depends on the local market price of cleaning. Depending on how big the place is, $150 is possible. In SF e.g. you can’t find a cleaner with $20-30. Hotels pay less on cleaner labor because it’s more efficient (cleaners are probably full time employees cleaning all rooms every day anyway).
And why it would be % of night rate? Cleaning fee is flat for one cleaning service. |
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| | Only makes sense if the host is actually paying professional cleaning service, or doing it themselves at the level provided at those services, after each stay. And I am very sure that’s not the case 99% of the time based on my own experience. I’d be thankful if the kitchen counter is clean and there is no trash. That’s actually not a low bar. |
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| | You’ve stayed in 100 Airbnb’s and only one of them had a clean kitchen counter and the trash taken out? That’s dedication to a service and also extremely bad luck. |
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| | The owner can clean it themselves or the cleaning fee should be built into the overall price, you know, like hotels. |
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| | > Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely. Twitter comes rapidly to mind |
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| | The difference is that Twitter is better than it’s ever been now, while Facebook and Airbnb continue to deteriorate. |
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| | Laugh away, but Old Twitter was run by some pretty scummy people who allowed the FBI and CIA to backdoor the service. It was also a lot slower and broken compared to how fast it is now, especially outside North America (they recently added a lot more server capacity). Also massively bloated as recently as a year ago. Loads of people working there who didn’t seem to do much except tweak icons 2000 times, enforce DEI mandates, and hit their department’s budget. Awful. Glad to see the deadwood getting cleaned out, speed enhancements, and new features being rolled out. |
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| | > You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets. I hear this a lot. I’ve always wondered if it was that easy wouldn’t a lot more people be buying properties and airbnb-ing them out through local agencies ? |
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| | People are generally fine bragging about where they work outside the bay area (and Seattle to a lesser degree). The stigma of Big Tech is somewhat localized. It’s a job – for many people, especially with families, they are fine with that, and they don’t wrap up their identity with it. The same happens in the defense industry. |
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| | I regularly see “disclaimer: I work in Google” in comments here. Also, “Why I left Google” is still (surprisingly) a somewhat popular genre. |
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| | I don’t think AirBNB is blameless, but so much of this could be avoided by simply building more homes to allow supply to meet demand. US cities have not been building enough homes for decades–this is the main driver of home values going up because scarcity drives prices up. The fact that the President, Congress, and most governors never really address this means it’s not going to be solved any time soon. Even in California we do half-measures like upzoning that will take years/decades to have any impact. |
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| | Its not just the shortage, its the change in usage. I live in fear that one of my neighbors will become an Air BnB house. Instead of friendly people next door you can grow with, there will be a continual turnover of short term people, parties and clueless behavior. |
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| | “People next door you can grow with” how quaint. I feel like I’m listening to a Hobbit from inside the Shire who doesn’t know Mordor has taken over outside. A little boost of positivity. |
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| | Building more homes requires infrastructure to support those homes. The real solution is to tax each additional dwelling ~30,000$ (depending on area) to pay for the infrastructure to support it and then actually build that infrastructure. |
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| | I’d go with a percentage instead of flat fee. Or some tiered structure to the flat fee. Some of these mega hosts own 40+ properties. |
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| | Either can work, but a 500k house and a 5 million dollar house are likely to need roughly the same supporting services in terms of schools and transportation etc. The goal of such fees is to avoid subsidizing any specific type of development but as long as it averages out then it’s presumably fine. |
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| | You won’t find one. The most cited article I’ve found shows that the most significant effect Airbnb has on rentals is a 0.5% rise in rental rates in Manhattan. It’s not 0, but it’s pretty damn close. |
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| | > people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market From what I’ve seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market. And restrictions on short term rentals have little to no effect on housing prices. It’s just another scapegoat (like foreign owned housing) that people like to use because they can’t accept the fact that the solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSING. (Reduce restrictions like exclusionary zoning and environmental/community reviews) |
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| | Ok, so ban AirBnB and more housing is available for people who want long term leases… but there’s still a problem, because now we have a shortage of temporary housing. Any solution that isn’t “build a fuckton more housing units” isn’t a solution at all. We need enough housing for permanent residents AND people who prefer to live in AirBnBs. Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea. |
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| | Obviously the solution is “build a million extra houses”. However, it turns out building a million houses takes time. Until the houses are built, get rid of the temporary housing meant almost exclusively for tourists this particular city doesn’t want, everybody wins. “Rich tourists” are good for purely tourist driven economies, but most cities don’t exist to please the whims of tourists, and most local businesses in a wealthy economy aren’t targeting rich tourists either. What actually happens is that family neighbourhoods are forced to deal with constant parties and drunk and loud tourists because some multimillionaire set up one of the rare available houses for his personal profit. I’m sure there are people who enjoy living in AirBnB’s but that’s not what AirBnB is even trying to accomplish. Hotels exist and are regulated for good reason. Tourists are put in touristy areas where businesses want to attract tourists, also for good reason. When dealing with a housing shortage, the local population is more important than tourists, unless there is no economy other than the tourist economy. Look at what happened to Venice, the city that exclusively exists because of tourists because of overtourism. |
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| | > Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea. Amsterdam specifically wants less tourists. They have a load of initiatives and policies to try reduce what they call “negative tourism” that are will just have the net effect of reducing overall tourism – the actual goal. Similar issues in Venice and some other European cities. Over tourism makes places less liveable for the residents who live – and vote – there. |
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| | Well I did hedge my wording because AirBnB has different effects in different places, so there is no global effect that can be measured. If you live in a ski town or beach town then it probably has had far more effect than the locals looking to buy or rent would want. if you live in a small town with very little tourism then people may feel like you do that its a non factor. New York city seems to think that 10,000 distinct places to live will come back to the market, is 10,000 units in New York “negligible” to use your wording? I don’t know but I’m guessing it will have some measurable effect. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145709106/nyc-could-lose-10-… |
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| | It depends on the locality. It is easy to forget even popular “tourist destinations” have their local population before they became so popular. Short term rentals have a very real effect on housing markets in such places. Kauai is one of my favorite Hawaiian islands and has one of the strictest short term rental regulations. I truly believe if short term rentals are free for all it would end up being a billionaire’s playground (more so than it already is) with no locals being able to afford housing at all. |
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| | > From what I’ve seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market It changes depending on the location. Some places e.g. Byron Bay in Australia have been significantly affected by short term rentals. |
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| | Maybe… though whenever I look closely it turns out that cities are suffering from structurally broken property markets, and short-term rentals are a convenient, highly visible scapegoat that puts the blame on something involving foreigners. |
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| | My nextdoor neighbor sold their house last year and now it’s an Airbnb. Despite the fact that I live in a house in a normal residential neighborhood, I’m now forced to live next to a hotel. And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating. I’ve read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors. |
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| | My next door neighbor also rents out her house. She has 5 others she does the same in. These are long term rentals, which means when the tenant is bad it’s bad for me long term. We got new neighbors last year, and while they struggle socially they’re respectful and it’s a huge quality of life improvement. Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I’m forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?). There’s nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one’s checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it’s eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren’t taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind. |
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| | Every time someone online complains loudly about an HOA, here is why people still choose to live in neighborhoods with HOAs. |
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| | I’m gonna disagree with this one. People chose to put uo with HOAs because 1) most new developments have them 2) SFH w/ HOA are more expensive |
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| | For every HOA that gets a Reddit post complaining about unreasonable behavior, there’s a dozen others that just effectively keep people from turning their front yard into a wrecking yard, and probably a hundred others that don’t enforce anything at all but just keep the common areas mowed. |
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| | One of the problems is that you don’t know what you’re buying. You might end up with a reasonable HOA or a terrible one. Even if it looks reasonable today, it might change tomorrow. Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They’re large enough that you’re in the minority, but small enough that they don’t have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you’re using your own property. I’ve heard that “just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs” argument many times over, but… I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I’m yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors’ supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that. Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn’t mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes – or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes. |
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| | > enforce anything at all but just keep the common areas mowed. HOA style Large grass areas and office park landscaping mcdonaldifies America and is a travesty for the environment and water use. Select grass areas for actual usage are okay but HOAs default to grass everywhere and bland non-native landscaping. And beige everything. |
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| | My county has laws about turning your front yard into a wrecking yard…def should look into it if you experience severely unmaintained yards or overloaded with trash with unmovable cars. But whether I cut my grass every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, or god forbird I decide to have a vegetable garden on the southern side of my house (covenance says must be backyard)…that’s HOA realm. |
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| | I have 113 potions. 100 are just Gatorade in a fancy bottle, 12 de-age you by a year, and the last one turns you into a vegetable forever. Should I be allowed to give people one at random to drink? |
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| | The associations are often mismanaged horribly because they are mostly lead by people that just want to use the power to get the changes they want to their property, and sometimes (this is not rare) the board will use lawyers to write letters coercing behavior which may be against the HoA constitution, also sometimes to save a buck they will operate based on policy which was voted by the board that is unconstitutional and has not been amended by owners. The only way to rectify this is to put your real life on hold and create a political movement against the board and/or hire attorneys to get them to settle, litigate, or start a class suit, which might I remind you will probably retaliate against you and waste more of your time. Meanwhile the HoA’s liability insurance premiums will go through the roof from hiring attorneys to defend themselves and so will your HoA fees. Lawyers love HoAs. Have heard about this from friends and family more than once.. it would be comical if it didn’t impede their ability to live so much. You may as well be renting from them. No, thanks! |
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| | >”The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it’s eventually reciprocated.” With who? I don’t have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that’s not what’s happening in my specific situation. Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It’s a big change. |
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| | The house next door to you was de facto rezoned from residential to hotel. In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn’t like it you could have easily held up the project for years. Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn’t be allowed. |
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| | Come to Amsterdam. Its city wide hobby to shit on Airbnb by residents and complain to newspapers and city. They even had an official city sponsored online participation board dedicated to complaining about airbnb. And it was pretty successful. Now so much registration is required to rent on Airbnb and max days that pretty much only professionals are left. They also gave like 10k fines to citizens who forgot a few things or days in the registration process. So the pendulum swung the other way here. |
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| | Housing prices are more complex than that, but it’s inarguable that more houses on the market means cheaper prices. Out of curiosity, do you own properties specifically to rent on short term rental sites? |
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| | I am the opposite and I get asked about this a lot. I bought a condo in a building (and neighborhood) that is almost all STR’s (near the beach). I’m the only person who actually lives in my building full time. I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply… in the past, I’ve lived next door to people I didn’t like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days. |
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| | Same situation here, and I was surprised to learn that my city doesn’t seem to have any rules against this. So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins. The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it’s a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them. |
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| | You have a say – go to your town’s planning and zoning commission, find others with similar concerns, and force votes on the legality of a full-time hotel next door. |
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| | In my town, stays of less than 30 days are illegal, and there’s a 10% tax. And yet, AirBnb and VRBO show dozens of listings. So if the rental contract itself violates city code, surely no tax is being paid either. This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal. |
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| | You absolutely have a say in the matter, but it’s possible that on one will listen. Talk to your local city council person (or local equivalent) and see if they are willing to ban short term rentals in areas that are not zoned for it. My city did that and it’s pretty great. |
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| | I used to live in a 4 unit apartment in SF. One of the units in the building was a full time Airbnb. On several occasions, the different Airbnb renters parked in the wrong spot in our small garage, which disrupted the parking situation for the non-Airbnb tenants in the unit. On another occasion, a renter got locked out of the front gate. I watched from my window as they bent the gate bars so they could open the gate without using the key. When I went down to the gate to ask them what they were doing, they denied damaging the property. Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary. Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul. |
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| | Is it difficult to imagine? Living next to a regular long-term rental has some of the same issues, AirBNB short term rentals just magnify that. Personally, one of the best things I ever did to improve my quality of life was move to a newly constructed mid/upper neighborhood where all houses are owner-occupied. It’s amazing how much better people act and treat their property when it’s actually their own. |
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| | Yes, it can be difficult to imagine for some people, based on their lived experiences. Those who have observed little or no unwanted behaviours from short-term renters wild tend to assume “It works.” or “It works the vast majority’ of the time.”. Some combinations of hosts, their rules, and guests can be successful and completely non-problematic. I, having lived some problematic places long before AirBnB existed, sympahise with your experience. I’ve been fortunate to see primarily successes. |
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| | Gee, how about having a parade of random people showing up at all hours of the day/night just to start? The erosion of community. Further commodification of housing so that only the rich and upper middle class can buy a house in any city? |
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| | I think the ownership is not encouraged anymore. Instead we have social mobility so that we can move anytime when better opportunities arise. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on which side you are. |
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| | Moving every time a better opportunity comes up is a privilege enjoyed by a small section of the population. The vast majority of people move rarely, and when they do move it’s usually within the same locality. |
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| | Even for people who can, family (spouse, kids in school, nearby relatives, etc.), friends, and so forth tend to make moving cities a pretty significant decision at some point. |
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| | It’s a cultural issue. Give it 1-2 generations and people won’t care that much about nearby relatives, friends etc. |
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| | Th trend line has been toward significantly less mobility relative to past decades–though you’d probably want to correct the numbers for demographics given that 20 somethings move the most (as one would expect). |
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| | Without home ownership you are throwing away a large portion of the money you may make in your life. Even if you move frequently it still makes sense to buy so long as you’re not hitting the tip of the market. |
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| | That last point – that housing is too expensive – is not something that airbnb causes or can fix. That’s a supply side problem and the solution is housing construction. It may marginally exacerbate the symptom by providing liquidity. |
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| | It’s creating liquidity, just not the kind you value. It’s liquidity of short term housing rather than long term housing. |
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| | Ok, then more accurately it’s moving liquidity. The next question is which is more valuable to society? |
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| | A cabin across the street from me was an AirBnB rental: very loud parties all weekend, running long after midnight. Then COVID came, and now AirBnB has gone down the toilet, so the problem has not returned. Yet. |
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| | Good luck finding a bylaw officer to enforce it, I’ve made many complaints in my city only to be told there’s only one person and they never showed up… and this is in a city of 700k. |
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| | Aside from the annoyance of the lifestyle of tourists vs residents, you miss out on having a normal neighbor who you can build a relationship over time with. Our neighbors keep a key, water plants while we’re away, babysit our kids, generally look out for each other. |
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| | Long-term rentals getting converted to short-term rentals in a constrained, inelastic market drives up prices, prices are set at the margin. You don’t publications for that, that’s just a basic fact. |
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| | Work with your municipality to pass an Airbnb ordinance. We have one; it limits the number of nights you can list your house for, requires a shall-issue license, an insurance certificate, and inspections, forbids rentals of less than 24 hours, and charges a fee for non-owner-occupied buildings. |
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| | I tried to buy a house that was instead bought as an Airbnb. I’m still annoyed, but on the bright side it looks like it’s almost never booked. |
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| | You can potentially come to a solution/agreement with a single neighbor. Less so if you’ve got a brand new neighbor every 2-3 days. |
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| | I’ve read they’re taken very seriously in some places like Germany and Japan, but in my experience, a lot of people in the USA won’t bother reporting noise violations because they know the chances of them being enforced and/or investigated in a timely manner is low. |
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| | Enforcement in Germany is quite funny. Lived there for some years. If you have a problem with noisy neighbours you basically must make a “noise diary” with date/time/description of the noise over a period of time before anyone will give a shit. Even then, enforcement varies wildly. Seems to depend where you are, etc. The best person to complain to is building management, but even then, they vary. The next best thing to do (and the most German solution) is leaving passive aggressive notes on the buildings noticeboard. |
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| | It depends, of course, but yes, I have had noise complaints addressed by some kind of code enforcement officer (i.e. unarmed, but able to write citations.) |
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| | > And I have no say in the matter. Super frustrating What say should you have in how your neighbor uses their house? You can live in an HOA with covenants that restrict renting, but that has their own set of problems. |
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| | But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors. This so much. There’s a neighbor on the street with a ‘unique’ house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB’ing it to film companies. So…a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn’t get the required city permits until after we complained. Lovely people in the film industry. /s The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They’re going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there’s a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we’ll get some new regs passed with more teeth. And, of course, AirBnB didn’t care one bit. |
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| | Here in Romania there are different rules if you rent your house this way (hotel style). You have to pay much more for the administration/utilities costs, which has some compensation effect |
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| | I take it you have never experienced an AirBnB neighbour? The people behind me have done it a few times. How can i tell they had “guests” over? I find beer bottles, coke cans and garbage on MY property. There is the obvious noise from the late night “pool parties” as well. Normally people dont care what their neighbours do, but when it starts to impact others, people start to care. |
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| | The average person doesn’t host a pool parties 100+ days out of a year as an Airbnb unit might. Filing complaints against a single noisy neighbor would also be a lot easier than doing it against people who will be gone by the time anyone looks into the matter. |
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| | There’s a big difference between dealing with something from a neighbor’s property once in a while, trash ending up in my property, guests not following neighborhood rules for parking, etc., and having to deal with it every single day. Neighborhoods have a lot of societal norms, my house has frequently been referred to as “the rental” even though I’ve lived here for years and the prior tenants also all had long runs here… even being a rental house in the neighborhood is considered strange here. |
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| | Cities and etc have zoning laws because it does matter what kind of activity happens next door. I lived in a town house association where the unit’s being rented were the source of noise, trash, crime, etc. People renting often don’t care as much for the neighborhood/ locals and they can move on at will. And you’d be surprised how much random citizen land lords are terrible at just being land lords. After the numbers of rentals were reduced (and background checks required) the neighborhood improved greatly. It was like turning off a light switch on noise, litter, crime, etc… |
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| | You don’t have the unchecked right to disturb your neighbor anywhere in the US as far as I know. Who was suggesting anyone should? |
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| | Who tf claimed that? It’s two completely different questions. The issue is not Airbnb or not. The issue is guests etiquette and difficulty to penalize bad/loud/disrespectful people. |
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| | I generally agree with you. But unless you’re allowed to knock down your house and build a 10 story apartment in it’s place then the argument kind of falls flat. |
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| | Would you oppose a smelly wastewater treatment plant being built on the previously residential property right next to you? That’s why they should get a say. |
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| | Is it not? I think it’s very comparable, you attempted to appeal to the freedoms of property owners but there are laws the govern the use of land wherever you go. |
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| | Airbnb most recently has continued to ignore requests to remove houses that violate the building’s HOA where i live. People have been turned away when they show up by security as it’s not allowed but the people just try to sneak them in. When reporting this to airbnb they refuse to do anything. I’m getting fairly sick of the laissez faire stances these companies are taking. It’s not just that we don’t want airbnb its that people in this area regularly rent airbnb with false names and rob the apartment and the ones next to it once in the building. Airbnb could care less about our safety though. It would be nice if the companies could stop hiding behind stupid corporate policies and actually care about people. Edit: to make things more sad when the building was sold as it’s brand new it was sold as no airbnbs and family only. Several couples moved in because they have been previously robbed in other buildings in the city and in nearby ones all from Airbnb rentals with false names. |
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| | This isn’t recent. Around 2017, the building where I lived had issues with theft. Tenants knew that the (historic) front door was finicky, but AirBnB people didn’t, so they’d effectively leave it open and packages got stolen. There were other issues with AirBnBs, but long story short, everyone agreed they were against HOA rules and had to go. I reached out to support to see if the building could get delisted. They responded… “The platform does not have the capability to delist a whole community currently but our Friendly Buildings Program does allow you to have complete transparency and control over home-sharing activity in your community. You would be able to set minimums number of guests, blackout dates, amenity restrictions, or even create a waiting list if you want only a small number of homes to have the home-sharing amenity. We understand in order to be able to control home-sharing, you would have to allow it in some capacity and change your CC&Rs, which is a process. Since our program establishes a partnership between Airbnb and your community, we would love to support in any way possible or even send someone to propose the idea to your board and fellow homeowners in person.” So in other words, you either work with them or they let things happen anyway. |
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| | AirBnB’s entire business is predicated on skirting regulation. The problem isn’t that they don’t care, it’s that caring would cost them money and invalidate their business model. |
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| | > AirBnB’s entire business is predicated on skirting regulation. From time to time you spot underappreciated comments here. This is one of them AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, etc – their entire business model is predicated on skirting regulations. Then people are surprised they don’t keep honest negative reviews? Why would a company which is knowingly violating rules care about your negative review? They make money from hosts putting their places up for rent, not from those renting and if a negative review causes a listing to be removed… Clearly it is far more economical to remove the review instead. |
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| | It’s not inherently bad. Some regulations are dumb and should be challenged by the market, like Uber and Lyft did to taxi companies and the protectionist regulations that kept them from evolving and improving. It’s less about removing the review or listing and more about looking at the belief system in the business. If a local government says “this space is for permanent residents only” AirBnB would say, “why?” and would rather ignore or fight the regulation than comply (or more likely “take it up with the host, not us”). There are legitimate questions to what terms a government/HOA can force on property owners renting out their residences. From taxation to civil rights and racial equity there’s a lot on the table to challenge. That said, companies can be reckless when choosing not deal with the question because it doesn’t have an easy answer and grow/scale at ethics’ expense. AirBnB has actually had to deal with this, like removing the ability of hosts to see guest photos before booking because of racial discrimination, and charging the appropriate hospitality taxes on listings to comply with the vast number of of municipalities they operate in. |
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| | keep in mind why some of those taxi regulations were created in the first place. In the not so distance past there was a FLOOD of drivers, few rules and regulations and eventually a “race to the bottom” (too many drivers chasing too few fares). Then the pendulum of regulation swings TOO FAR in the other direction, creating the “medallion” system where these are worth a small fortune. A happy medium is where the market self-clears with reasonble regulations to protect both drivers and consumers. AirBnB is in the same boat. It was a good idea when it was individuals renting out unused rooms for some extra cash. now AirBnB is an unlicensed hotel, where people buy up houses specifically for AirBnB. There are countless stores of people renting property, and then turning around and putting that on AirBnB. And strongly agree, some rules are dumb, but the correct approach should be to push for change, not run illegal businesses like AirBnB, Uber, etc. If i called someone to come get me from “A” and drop me off at “B” how is this “ride sharing” and not a taxi service? |
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| | > reasonable regulations to protect both drivers and consumers. I would rather regulations exist to protect consumers and communities without respect for the business owners/operators’ needs. Businesses don’t have an inherent right to exist or be profitable and the choice to protect them is one of pragmatism (eg: national defense, airlines, rail). I think something got lost in my last reply, I don’t think companies should flagrantly break laws and feel that governments should take the gloves off more often to slap them with massive penalties for ignoring them. But it’s not black and white. |
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| | Seems like thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis: too many taxis result in badservice
Antithesis: too many restrictions also result in bad service
Synthesis: breaking some of the laws results in better service Now we talk about regulating the gig economy, a horrible thing mostly brought by Uber and airbnb: let’s see where it leads us. |
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| | The pendulum of regulation will swing too far in the other direction, it ALWAYS does. Mostly because the government sits around and does nothing until things get really bad, then they institute very strict rules to prevent a repeat. Had they gotten involved earlier they would have had more flexibility with the regulations. |
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| | The entire “gig economy” would be much better named the “scofflaw economy”. Far more than technology, a willingness to deliberately ignore laws/rules/regulations/decency is the core competency of AirBNB, Uber, GrubHub and pretty much every other major player in the space. |
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| | I wanted a term to define companies/apps that solely exist to skirt laws and regulations and then I realized it’s the entire whole of “gig economy” companies. |
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| | I reported a neighbour’s AirBNB listing (showing 10+ reviews and plenty of pictures) and they had their lease terminated. I couldn’t believe it 🙂 I’d been finding bags of rubbish in the corridor, or in a recycling bin, and was woken several times by wheely suitcases bump-bump-bumping down the stairs early on a Monday. Denmark changing the tax laws to require AirBNB to report short-term rental income for tax also helped. |
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| | Check if the listings also violate local planning laws and if so contact your local planning office. In the past our local planning office was reticent to become involved beyond sending a notification of potential violation. These were mostly ignored. My locality a few years ago passed new rules requiring registration of short term rentals and certain requirements to do so including being in compliance with HOA rules. Since then the planning office has become more willing to take actual action. Those willing to ignore HOA rules are often willing to ignore local tax collection rules so contacting your local tax authority to let them know you suspect someone violating the local tax laws is an option. Even when the planning officials were hesitant to get involved the tax folks were willing. I have reported realtors which own or have close connections to those owning short term units violating HOA rules to the state licensing board. My experience is that realtors willing to knowingly violate HOA rules have often previously been censured by the licensing board for other issues. This in particular has been amazingly effective at getting units quickly removed and listed for sale. Once the listing is removed I withdraw my complaint and I have never had to follow through to completion. Luckily once the registration laws went into effect there have only been a couple of people attempting to do short term rentals in my HOA and reporting them locally has ended those attempts. |
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| | The city ought to be dealing with unlicensed hotels, but of course it won’t, since decisions are made by the politically connected landowner class. Airbnb just gives better returns than longterm rentals, and because of that it also increases property values. Landowners won’t reduce their income stream, that’s for sure. |
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| | I think there’s a point to be made about single family dwellings, but it’s hard to imagine how a 50 condo building would operate without one. Who takes care of the pool? Or fixes the elevator? The governance is definitely poorly structured, though. In my (limited) experience I’ve seen a board that gets elected and then proceeds to abuse their power to advance their own financial positions. I think there should be a 3rd party company that competes for the management contract and annual contracts are awarded based off democratic vote from all the owners. |
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| | My takeaway from dealing with a condo HOA is that condos shouldn’t legally exist, because people owning fractional buildings is doomed to result in structural collapse. Elected residents aren’t qualified to make decisions about long-term maintenance which becomes more severe and expensive over time, and they have perverse incentives to avoid spending money. Faced with a substantial enough cost, board members can opt to hide problems while they try to sell their own stake in the building. That’s being said, $&@# AirBnB. |
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| | “People owning fractional buildings” has existed for almost 150 years, at what point should we start to see NYC buildings collapsing due to structural collapse? |
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| | This is false. The first condominium in the continental US was built in 1960, the entire scheme is only 63 years old. There’s some older buildings that have been converted, sure, but the legal concept isn’t that old. And buildings start needing more significant structural work after forty or fifty years. Which is to say, yes, I expect many more condos to collapse over the next couple decades. |
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| | > The first condominium in the continental US was built in 1960, the entire scheme is only 63 years old. This is correct in the sense that it is technically correct (for residential dwellings; commercial condominiums have existed for almost a hundred years prior). However, residential cooperatives (co-ops) have existed in the United States since the mid-1800s. These are functionally the same as a condominium with a slightly different legal structure. But the end result is identical: multiple owners jointly managing a building in which they all own a stake. |
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| | I mean, FWIW, the issue primarily relates solely with residential dwellings: Businesses generally have a better grasp on risk factors. Also, many residential cooperatives, to my knowledge, refer largely to house-sized structures, especially… in the mid-1800s. It’s much more affordable to manage repairs for less floors and traditional wood frame construction. It’s also plausible the legal structure of a condominium itself is the problem that leads to, well, largely incompetent management. Obviously I’m not sure landlords are a winning solution for anyone either. But particularly for large structures, I would prefer actual public/government management over a quasi-government entity comprised of self-centered residents. |
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| | Technically a condo owner has fee simple (i.e. absolute) ownership of the airspace in their unit and tenancy in common (i.e. shared) with the other owners for the walls, floors and common areas. I guess what you’re arguing here is that groups of people shouldn’t be able to own real property collectively, which would undermine a lot of the legal infrastructure that underpins business and society today; not just condos. For example, what if one’s parents die and probate leaves the family house to the adult children (who are obviously not married to each other), how would they take title? |
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| | The idea I can own my airspace, but be entirely dependent on some other idiots with no qualifications to make key decisions that determine if the floor, walls, and ceiling continue to remain stable and surrounding my property is problematic. Surfside will not be the last large condo to collapse this decade. The legal structure makes some sense but the accountability is a joke. Structural safety should be handled at a more reputable level. Also the definitions between your property and the common elements is… unclear in many cases, at best, and somewhat predatory in design at worst. |
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| | HOAs are the most local form of democratic government that most Americans interact with. They have an elected board, which you can run for if you’re a member (owner), and an amendable constitution. In every state that I’m aware of, you have full access to the budget and all meeting minutes. I’ve even seen recall elections and funded campaigns. Democracy is never perfect, but for any place where I’m living in close quarters to my neighbors (e.g. not in a rural area with 20-acre lots) I’d 1000x rather an HOA than either anarchy or some builder-run “committee.” |
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| | Sure let’s delegate decisions that are entirely neighborhood and building specific to a company that doesn’t even understand the local issues. Yeah HOAs can suck and aren’t needed in some cases but in my case the HOA is doing the correct thing and legal action has been taken against these places. It’s a shame airbnb won’t enforce local government policies because it will eventually blow up in their face only after people like me and my neighbors are harmed. |
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| | My HOA is primarily a collective bargaining tool for trash pickup. Over 80% of the annual fee goes to trash service. The cost of the HOA is significantly less than even the most budget-minded trash service. |
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| | Do you know how such a minimal scope had been maintained? I’m envisioning either a pretty new HOA or maybe a structure that somehow forbids scope creep. |
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| | In my experience, I’ve seen lots of _old_ HOAs that are similar — only there for utilities that the larger municipality is lacking (like trash, recycling, snow removal, etc). It’s the new ones — those that are set up by the developer from the get go that get lambasted and become the stereotype. |
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| | Definitely not new- when I purchased the home, my attic had a box with HOA board member documents from the 1980s. |
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| | Also, I can’t say I know, other than everyone on the board seems to agree with how it’s ran. |
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| | AirBnB is itself an HOA over a distributed network of properties. Violate its rules and you’re a goner. Don’t pay their “taxes”, whether literal taxes or AirBnB taxing you by having you pay via your labor in changing your home, curating your listing(s) on AirBnB, writing reviews on AirBnB, being responsive above a percentile set by AirBnB, etc. All as AirBnB demands. No input from you. |
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| | Given the circumstances mentioned in GP’s comment, it appears they are living in a condo, and the HOA is constructed to cover the rules for the use and maintenance of jointly-owned portions of the building. This isn’t a case of “HOA is mad that next door neighbor used a wrong species of grass for their lawn.” |
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