
Airbnb and Housing - lennysan
http://publicpolicy.airbnb.com/airbnb-housing/
======
dangerlibrary
There's a line: if it becomes more profitable to rent at Airbnb's nightly
rates than at monthly / long-term rates, property investors will then drive
down long-term housing supply, increasing property values and monthly rents.

Airbnb's claim is that there is no evidence suggesting that the line has been
crossed, so the only impact of their service is that existing landowners /
renters get to line their pockets a bit.

They don't have a leg to stand on if you see people successfully investing in
property to rent exclusively at short-term rates, which has started to happen
in some markets [1][2]. I'm tempted to cheekily link to their own blog post
here indicating that 13% of their NYC hosts are doing exactly this.

And don't even get me started on the fact that while looking for a place to
live, landlords have justified their insane asking rate by telling me that the
previous tenant rented out a spare room on Airbnb.

1\. [http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-
airbnb/](http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/) 2\.
[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/home-sharing-
sit...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/home-sharing-site-san-
francisco-evictions/)

~~~
chimeracoder
> And don't even get me started on the fact that while looking for a place to
> live, landlords have justified their insane asking rate by telling me that
> the previous tenant rented out a spare room on Airbnb.

Ah, that's lovely. Coupled with the "no subletting" clause standard in NYC
leases, this means that landlords can jack up rent while _also_ giving
themselves an easy excuse to terminate your lease at any point in the future
when they decide it's convenient (for them) to do so.

(If you think this is too sleazy and underhanded to be believable, you've
never tried renting an apartment in NYC. There are certainly some great
exceptions - my current management co. is great - but I've heard some great
horror stories, and experienced one of my own.)

~~~
lmg643
it's a strange thing to contemplate how a startup like this could directly
contribute to housing cost inflation in your own backyard. and to think you
might be right - the answer could be you might need to give up some privacy
(let strangers have run of your home) to live where you want - wow - that's a
bright future we're working with.

i'm an apartment dweller myself - i'm going to check with the building
management today to see if they ban this kind of short term rental in my
building. at least protect myself on my own turf.

~~~
vdaniuk
> to live where you want

To use an extremely scarce resource that is considered to be valuable by most
humans. I am sure there are no problems like these in cheaper, less popular
cities.

------
sneak
I am really tired of these "oh shit we have to issue a PR spin control
response" posts that presume I've already read the original drama and don't
link to it.

"You might have seen a story" my ass. Link to something if you're going to
respond to it.

~~~
brianchesky
You're right; we should have linked to it. I'm changing that now.

~~~
gamblor956
Are you also planning on addressing the numerous factual misrepresentations in
the post? Because your [edit:AirBnB's (Brian is CEO is AirBNB)] already poor
credibility is taking a real beating: see pretty much all of the comments on
this page.

~~~
brianchesky
I am not aware of any factual misrepresentations, but I am working my way
through some of the comments.

------
rdl
I kind of hate when people cherry-pick stats to be misleading, even if I
otherwise support them.

The relevant number for NYC is not the _percentage of hosts_ sharing a primary
residence, but the percentage of total listings in NYC, or percentage of room-
nights booked. I'm sure those numbers are far worse than 13%. Anyone renting
non-primary residences is probably renting a _lot_ of non-primary residences.

~~~
brianchesky
You are correct that there are some hosts that list multiple properties, thus
skewing the listing breakdown. It depends on the city. In most cities, room
nights and revenue for "primary dwellings," meaning the homes people live in,
are around 70-80%. We are in 34,000 cities, so this really varies quite
widely. I would like to see the breakdown to be skewed much closer to primary
dwellings for two reasons - (1) they have much higher review scores from
guests, and (2) they don't typically enrich cities the way ordinary hosts do
(though there are always exceptions. We are actually working with cities and
our community to remove corporate rental companies that don't meet the above.

~~~
rdl
What is acceptable varies by market too (IMO). In Bali, the "owner lives in a
house with 3-4 rental houses attached" is totally fine, and just as
"authentic" as sharing a single house, since it's common for an extended
family to live like that.

------
crystaln
PR disguised as science. I like Airbnb in many ways, but these arguements are
shallow and wrong. If Airbnb is used to help pay for rent, that necessarily
pushes rent upwards. That their research shows Airbnb makes housing "more
affordable for families" could only be based on families renting out vacant
rooms, something not all families want to do but may be forced to do if Airbnb
is widespread.

This is Fox News level "science." This article made me slightly queezy.

~~~
_delirium
> If Airbnb is used to help pay for rent, that necessarily pushes rent
> upwards.

I definitely know people who are contemplating getting a bigger place with a
spare room specifically to AirBnB it. Besides general effects on the housing
market, this can increase people's financial risk (depending other aspects of
their finances, such as savings cushion). It amounts to over-provisioning
their housing in the hopes of reselling the spare capacity at a profit (you
figure you can get more on AirBnB for the 3rd room than the incremental
2rd->3rd room costs you). That can turn out badly if somehow the reselling
doesn't work, isn't as profitable as you thought it would be, you end up
unable to manage it for a period of time so the extra capacity sites idle,
etc. Sort of like buying extra servers in a colo because you figure you can
make the money back by renting VPSs at a markup. It can definitely work, but
to really make it work you are now in the VPS business, and you might lose
money if you aren't good at that business.

~~~
frandroid
In most rental markets, it's more difficult to find affordable housing for 3BR
and 2BR units for families. If more people rent out 2BR and 3BR appartments to
rent out the extra room, that's going to put more pressure on families looking
for affordable housing.

------
bcgraham
I don't know how they can argue with a straight face that using short-term
rent to pay mortgages and leases doesn't raise the prices of real estate. That
extra income is (obviously) going to get factored into real estate prices when
someone makes an offer on a property. And the people who are using it now to
supplement mortgages are going to use that income as a selling point when they
try to sell their property - "gets $XXX/day on short-term rentals."

EDIT: typos & minor wording

~~~
judk
Hacker News stories need an auto-bot-post explaining supply and demand and
"seller's market" AMD "buyer's market".

~~~
stefan_kendall
But my gut feeling tells me that supply and demand have nothing to do with
price! It's all greedy landlords and tech elitists trying to evict me out of
my home I can't afford.

------
nedwin
"56% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco said they use their Airbnb income to
help pay their mortgage or rent."

If these people didn't use AirBNB they couldn't afford their rent. They'd move
out or find a cheaper place. Now they have AirBNB they can afford to pay more
rent which raises the market.

~~~
jusben1369
Which is no doubt very true. But this still may be an argument for _keeping_
Airbnb in the bigger picture if you value diversity in your neighborhoods. Any
by diversity I mean the ability for many low to mid wage workers to live near
their jobs.

~~~
nedwin
That could be true.

The risk is that it prices the low to mid wage workers out with AirBNB not
even keeping them in an area. I'd love to see a study on the average income of
AirBNB hosts outside of their AirBNB income.

------
nobbyclark
They are referring to this article on Slate -
[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airb...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airbnb_gentrification_how_the_sharing_economy_drives_up_housing_prices.html)

> If you’re looking for a place to stay in Marfa this evening, there are a
> total of five options available. In the six year history of Airbnb, only 17
> properties have ever been booked in Marfa. So it’s difficult to argue that
> Airbnb is having any impact on the housing market in this community.

Kinda funny reading that then the original article on slate attempting to make
something out of this non-story

~~~
crystaln
So you found there to be some reliable information in the Airbnb article?
Please extract that here, as I all I found was a bunch of unsupported
defensive statements cleverly disguised as scientific conclusions.

------
alcari
> 87% of Airbnb hosts in New York share only the home in which they live

Does this mean they're admitting that 13% of Airbnb hosts in New York are
sharing other properties?

I was under the impression that Airbnb strongly denied such people existed.

~~~
mjolk
That's kind of crazy -- more than one out of ten is an illegal hotel as per
their own statistics.

------
jmduke
So, if I'm reading this right, a bit more than one in eight AirBnB hosts in
New York are violating the law? Is that not an issue in of itself?

~~~
chermanowicz
Worse. 2/3rd of listings are or would be violating NY laws:

"Two thirds of the listings that contain user reviews are for the “Entire
home/apartment” room type (listings without reviews are slightly less, at
64%). Because of a New York State law regarding short-term housing, it is
almost always illegal to rent a full apartment when the host is not present
for less than 30 days."

~~~
potatolicious
This seems to fly in the face of AirBnb's claim: "87% of Airbnb hosts in New
York share only the home in which they live."

Anecdotally just surfing around what's currently listed - the _vast_ majority
of listings are for whole home/apartments, only a minority are shared.

IMO there are some major shenanigans going on in AirBnb's numbers.

Side note: I _hate_ , _HATE_ , this weasel word, "sharing": "Rosen’s work also
examined whether some people would stop renting their apartments to permanent
residents and start sharing them only on Airbnb."

IT'S CALLED RENTING. AirBnb hosts are "sharing" their apartments to visitors
as much as my local restaurant is "sharing" their food with me.

~~~
geebee
I completely agree with you about the term "sharing" economy. That term is
certainly a PR victory for many of these companies.

This is commerce, and I would agree that a new, disruptive, form of commerce
has been enabled by the web. There will be tremendous benefits, and there will
be new problems and externalities. The old regulatory regime will need to
adapt, but (in my opinion), this does not mean that zoning laws are now
obsolete. Some laws are obsolete, others may be more relevant than ever.

Maybe "micro-commerce" would a better term? In any case, "sharing" is an
extremely inaccurate and misleading term here.

------
jusben1369
Boy that Slate article is just bad. So one sided. Airbnb is absolutely
disrupting the home ownership/rental and hotel markets. Like any market there
might be winners and losers. It will sort itself out though and we'll settle
at a new balance.

------
codex
This is a great example of the the danger of consuming "raw" corporate
propaganda. Without professional journalists to fact-check, look for other
perspectives, and filter corporate self-interest, many readers will come out
misinformed. Information supply becomes further tainted by attempts to
manipulate the average Joe.

I really hope the NYTimes and Washington Post don't go out of business; I rely
on them to adjudicate most of my news.

~~~
sethhochberg
Agreed - especially given the popularity of sites like the Tampa Bay Times'
politifact.com, I hope we'll continue to see newspapers take advantage of
their fact-checkers and editorial teams outside (and inside) of their own
publications. It might be a great way for those organizations to stay relevant
- sort of like "Snopes for the real world".

------
_delirium
From a purely user point of view I wonder if they could automate this
classification and let me use it as a search filter. AirBnB's compelling use-
case for me is as a "paid couchsurfing": people renting out spare rooms in
their residence, the whole residence while they're temporarily gone, etc. In
many cities those are indeed the main kind of result. But in a few cities
there are a lot of listings that are more like a commercial operator,
depending on the location ranging from "DIY hostel" to VRBO-style listings.
I'd rather just exclude those from the search, because I don't find AirBnB to
be a very useful portal to that kind of property (most of the legit vacation-
rental type stuff have their own websites where you can rent directly, and the
"DIY hostel" stuff I'd rather stay away from). As is I have to spend a good
bit of time manually trying to filter them out.

------
forgingahead
Surprised to see them mention NYC in this -- given the legal attention they
are facing, it would have been better to not mention the city at all, or any
stats about it, so as not to give the critics ammunition (eg: "In their OWN
BLOG POST, they admit...")

------
codex
Hotels are a form of progressive taxation: rich out of town travelers pay more
for housing than permanent residents. Generally travelers are richer than non
travelers because traveling is usually a discretionary expense or paid for by
a corporation.

AirBnb eliminates the progressive taxation, thereby raising living expenses
for poorer residents. Rich people love it, poor people hate it. Sure, you can
make some money in the short term by renting out your spare room, but in the
long term, as rents rise, this process involuntarily turns your two bedroom
apartment into a one bedroom + strangers' room apartment.

Just wait until San Francisco "Google bus activists" get a whiff of AirBnb.

------
vdaniuk
So, HN community in these threads is against of Airbnb because it pushes up
the prices of housing in desirable cities/city regions. Did I get it right?
What's so bad about that?

~~~
brianchesky
There isn't actually evidence that this occurs that I am aware of.

------
w1ntermute
The solution to this problem is to allow property developers and landowners to
freely increase the housing supply. And then start charging land taxes instead
of property taxes, to encourage such development.

~~~
camus2
> The solution to this problem is to allow property developers and landowners
> to freely increase the housing supply.

I dont think such a thing will ever be possible. Some big companies in the
housing market might even be against it.

