I stayed in an Airbnb in Toronto last year. It was a beautiful new building in a trendy neighborhood. The unit was very clearly setup for continual airbnb rentals and wasn't anyone's primary residence.
Only after booking was I given very specific and careful instructions on how to avoid any interaction with other residents or building security, entering and leaving through the parking garage.
During my stay I felt like a criminal, even though I quickly figured out that this was a pretty normal thing in this particular building, which was known for loud parties and inconsiderate visitors.
What a terrible experience for me as the guest and the people who have to put up with strangers constantly coming and going.
Airbnb is cool when we're talking about a vacation home or occasional rental of your primary residence - not as a clandestine hotel. I'd be willing to bet that most people, homeowners or responsible renters agree with that, Airbnb's growth goals be damned.
There's a high probability that's my building. It's known for all of those things, and AirBnB stays have long been against building policy for that reason.
I could care less -- I'm a renter, not an owner here -- but the parties do get real stupid and leave the place a real mess. I'm talking urine in the elevators on a Monday morning stupid.
Most days there are people coming in and out with luggage. It's kind of ridiculous.
Well, nope. Not mine. I guess it's not such a rare occurrence anymore.
Funny, I used to live in a less trendy neighbourhood and I hardly ever saw AirBnB-ers...
I live in Liberty Village now, as a result of getting the boot from my last place because the owners wanted to take it over. They visited for the first time while I lived there. The buildings down here that aren't the million-dollar lofts seem to be rampantly used for AirBnB stays -- mainly as a party location -- often with people from the city who just wanted a place they didn't care about.
Anyway, you should, because it is driving up rents for you. And if the person renting to you decided they want to go the effort of making 2x as much money, they could kick you out and do it.
I've been through that situation before, and without AirBnB being the culprit. In fact, it was how well my girlfriend and I had done up the place that the owners wanted to take up residence there.
I think my biggest peeve is the ease at which indiscriminatory lease is made to anonymous people for an unchallengeable fee, rendering buildings where security has been paid for open to anybody who's willing to put forward ~$50 - $100.
I've used AirBnB to visit Montreal and stayed in a couple's charming townhome and it was a great experience.
The two applications aren't equal in my eyes, so it seems there needs to be a line drawn -- the question where is a tough one. But that's me. There seems to be a wide range of opinion here.
Anyway friend, I'm all for regulations where fitting but there are no guarantees no matter what guards you put up that you won't hit a bad run, so it's not something I'm going to spend my time worrying about and instead prepare for whatever I can.
Yes. I don't have any sympathy; I felt deceived. Maybe some people don't care, but that isn't what I want to deal with on a vacation. If I had been booted out mid-stay by an astute security guard, it would have been a total nightmare.
There's a lot of cities trying to figure out how to handle Airbnb -- Barcelona for example is cracking down on unlicensed AirBNB's -- and the reason is the resulting rent increases.
Like taxis and taxi cab companies taking their hatred out on Lyft or Uber, I do believe that technology changes economies and that this will be another example of a misled attempt to prevent a technology from changing a city's economy. I also believe that many times these preventative measures are led by lobbyists by the very industry that is being hurt by the technology, and in this case it's likely hotels -- but then blaming it on rent prices.
It'll be great to see where all this leads, but making it illegal and taking it out on owners or drivers is going the wrong direction.
Not sure if ride sharing and home sharing are the same thing.
Ride sharing disrupted the cab industry, gives a large amount of the population access to cheap and plentiful transportation, and cars are plentiful too. The loser is the cab industry and the winner is the general population.
Home sharing is disrupting the hotel industry, but its customers are tourists and non locals, and housing stock is very limited. So city populations are going to be paying higher housing costs since they are now competing with entrepreneurs (serving tourists and non locals) for the same units. In theory, rents may continue to increase until they find a balance with hotel rates. Here the losers are hotels and long term renters and the winners are short term renters, property owners, and entrepreneurs.
There's also the externalized cost of disrupting communities. AirBnB is significantly changing the dynamic of where these people live and they get nothing in return for it.
I find it interesting that people who normally are so pro-contract (you can contract away your right to sell a printer cartridge) seem to be in the other camp when it comes to dwellings (well of course you don't have to abide by the contract saying you won't rent it on AirBnB) or just silent on the issue.
I'm failing to see how this relates to contracts in reference to home sharing. When someone buys they're home, did they sign a contract saying"The undersigned agrees that nothing will ever change within 10 miles from the property."? Or are you talking about people renting against actual contractual prohibitions against short term rentals and subletting?
I guess my question would be why is the housing stock so limited? If there is a profitable use for new housing then you would think it would be built, unless something were preventing it out making it uneconomical.
It's pretty straighforward economics. Local landowners get to make the laws, and they have a vested interest in their houses being expensive. Sure, it means more mortgage debt and slower economic growth as cost-of-living strangles marginal businesses, but that's a cost that other people have to pay later. So, in typical Boomer fashion - fuck you, I got mine, have fun being up to your eyeballs in debt to us.
You got it. I was asking a leading question. What's needed is a (political) counter weight to that. Maybe as millennials get more squeezed by this, they'll become more politically active locally and push for reforms to this. But I'm a little depressed because they'll probably just reach for the same non-solutions or current political class reach for, like rent control and low income inclusion requirements.
Local activity isn't helpful, because the incentives work out much better for rent control and low income inclusion. Actually lifting the building controls that cause the shortage means pissing off the incumbent neighbors at your expense, for the benefit of people who either commute in or will move to your area in the future.
Current land-use regulation is in this really bad area, where the governing entities responsible are large enough to seek rents and small enough to avoid being responsible for their negative externalities.
The solution to the "Airbnb problem" of rising home costs is less regulation, not more. It's the same situation in virtually every other city: housing regulations preventing increased vertical development are the true culprit, not services like airbnb which in my opinion are a positive force for home prices due to them adding "housing liquidity" to the market. Sure, in the immediate short term an airbnb rental property buying spree could raise house prices, but once housing prices are high enough, real estate developers will realize that they can just build bigger/more buildings.
That said, I do think it is fair for airbnb rentals to be subject to the same taxes and regulations as hotels.
Edit: I don't mean that housing liquidity raises or increases home prices. I think that would be tough to say. I just mean that it's good for the housing market from a consumer standpoint: it creates a kind of flexible vehicle for dealing with short term housing needs. It's better as a society for us to have a way to rent somewhere for a week than to not have such a way to do that (and hotels only offer a very specific kind of residence, which is not to everyone's taste).
> The solution to the "Airbnb problem" of rising home costs is less regulation, not more.
Regulation around short term rentals and regulation around construction and zoning are two very different things. I agree that every city can probably benefit from more progressive construction policy, but that doesn't mean that restricting short term rentals isn't also a good idea.
It's nice to think that the free market combined with liberal policies will produce so much capacity that all problems around pricing (and by extension AirBnB) will be solved, but we haven't seen much evidence that this can occur in a timely enough manner to come anywhere close to meeting demand, which may also be increasing over that time. Here in San Francisco for example, we've seen a massive construction boom over the last few years, but it's having no effect on prices because even though thousands of new units are coming online, the pent up demand still vastly exceeds the new supply.
Even assuming you could solve the problem with construction, the solution will come on a decade scale whereas AirBnB can entire change the face of a city's rental market in a few years, or less (take a Berlin for example). Popular cities would still need restrictions on AirBnBs to keep the problem in check until longer term increases in housing capacity can be put in place.
The Toronto skyline is filled with high rise apartments and cranes building more. The city has added over 200,000 condo units since 2000.
And, regardless of the impact on housing prices, it is certainly within the role of civic government to determine that they reject short term renters from imposing externalized costs on neighbors.
(And yes, more cities need to get out of the way of housing being built. Would that other cities had half the construction that one sees in Toronto)
While Toronto does need to cut back on development regulations, we've been developing like crazy. A good deal of speculative money had pumped housing prices above what most people can afford in a very short period of time. AirBnB is part of that problem.
In Toronto they estimate you need to make ~130k / yr to afford a home (any home). Bear in mind that a software dev in Toronto makes ~80k / yr. Up until very recently, our lower wages matched a lower cost of living in the city, but this has been blown up by things like foreign investment, and locals taking out a line of credit on their main home to put a down payment on income generating properties. No other sector in Toronto has seen price inflation like this, it's only been housing.
The problem with the deregulation thesis is that you now have to compete with a lot more people for resources. In the housing case, you now are competing with people who live in completely different economies or have substantial economic advantage over you. As an example, a Toronto home is extremely inexpensive to a bay area software dev making ~150k / yr (CAD ~200k). As a side hustle, this might seem like a good investment, and locals simply can't compete.
(I realise bay area rent is insane and this isn't likely fair without taking bay area cost of living into account, I just wanted to use a relevant example).
Where are you getting the ~80k salary figure? (edit: sincere question!)
My experience sees an average of 10 to 30k less than that within the city save a couple of outlets (at the developer level).
The rest of what you're saying is totally valid. Most of the places I've rented have been owned by people living at (put mildly) great distances from the city. This seems to be a common experience.
To be honest the number is sort of hearsay. I didn't mean 80k as an entry-level pay, but it seems to be about right in my experience (downtown core jobs).
I'd classify you as lucky, but maybe that's just from my position. I make significantly less working in the downtown core as well. I'm not a senior staff member, but I'm not entry-level either. Either way, I guess it leaves me with some hope.
One thing I feel that is often missed is even if you go on a large building spree there are HOA's to contend with. In all the places I have owned there three very strict guidelines on the number of properties within the community that can be rented. This is to protect the owners who wish to, you know, actually live there.
I have been on a HOA where we essentially forced an owner to sell their unit as we wouldn't authorize them to rent it out as we were at capacity of homes rented out. The decision was made to not make an exception as once you make one you have very little ground to refuse others.
The problem with AirBnb is that if you live anywhere in the downtown core (particularly King West in Toronto), you're likely to encounter AirBnbs being rented out to parties. And especially on a consistent basis. It's extremely annoying in condos when you have loud obnoxious guests who rent it for a weekend night not just in their units, but in the hallways.
Not to mention, that consistently in a condo that my family owns, we consistently see weekend warriors leaving empty beer bottles and garbage in the elevators and condos.
Yeah, it's not technically AirBnb's fault or even necessarily the condo board's fault. It's partially a result of living in an area with irresponsible young people combined with short-term renters who don't care. But when rules, bylaws, and laws have no real teeth, people aren't incentivized to actually deal with the problems that neighbouring tenants face.
At least the proposal allows for full apartment rental any x months of the year, it's just you can't be an AirBnB landlord and snap up a bunch of units you don't live in.
Still true to the spirit of AirBnB without housing market externalities. Sounds like an ideal model for cities.
You don't have to catch them all, just enough to make some examples. If you're not doing some kind of greyball uber shenanigans, one semi-competent police officer can close the circle on somebody pretty easily.
Search AirBnB listings in Toronto that offer "full house" rental. It's a pretty strong clue. But obviously it's not the whole picture, as you may be renting your entire house or apartment while you're on vacation.
I'm from Toronto and work in the apartment rentals industry, and I think it's pretty clear that nobody actually believes that Airbnb rentals are having any sort of real impact on home prices and rents in the city. Since Airbnb listings in units people purchased just to Airbnb make up such a tiny portion of the housing stock, it's not sensible to think that this regulation is really targeted at impacting rents.
It's also worth mentioning that unlike NYC and SF where this may actually be a real issue, buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a profitable way. Airbnb rents in most parts of Toronto make it impossible to turn a profit worth the hassle, and most I know who have considered it decided not to based on the economics.
I suspect the political motivations are the mayor (who is generally sensible) wanting to be seen at least doing "something" to address rising rents, as well as catering to the various industry lobbies and other politicians who are generally uncomfortable with any industry operating in a largely unregulated way.
„...buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a profitable way...“
So you are saying it is more profitable to rent out longterm than short-term? Totally not my experience. Hosts on Airbnb easily make 3x to 4x the usual rent (Munich, Germany), even far outside the city center. But might be purely city related...
Agree. I have investment properties in a few cities, and consider airbnb only as an option of last resort to fill vacancies. The daily rates seem high on the surface, but the turnover, vacancies, risks, management costs all eat away at the profits.
I mostly agree. Tory's strategy seems to be optics first, policy second. Even if it means going against his more conservative principles. It doesn't really factor in the people who live in neighbourhoods/areas affected by poor Airbnb tenants/renters.
The issue with cutting a deal with Japan, as I see it at least, is that there are all these other countries where you now have to answer the question "Well, if you were willing to deal with _____, why not me?" As it appears that Japan has a deal that Canada, or America for that matter, can't get, now Airbnb is going to have to explain why, beyond being (so far) successful in playing different sides against each other.
Alternate perspective on perma-rented AirBnB listings (that is, properties exclusively used full-time for AirBnB rentals): it is an externalization of unaccounted for costs in the degradation of the commons, and raising overall risks upon permanent residents. This is currently an unsolved problem, messily left to the permanent residents who are adversely-impacted to handle on their own. I'm not personally affected, but read about these points raised in municipal ordinance discussions about banning short-term rentals.
The stories about trashed public areas, even frequent instances of vomit, urine, and feces found in stairwells and elevators, are common, and some are even brought up in this thread. Who bears the cost (materials, time and/or labor) of clean up?
When the guests stay only 2-3 nights, and hold a raucous party on the last night that keep waking up the next door neighbor's infant, that degrades the commons. Sure they're gone by the following morning, sure the owner can ban that specific renter from ever renting the property again, but the key difference between a permanent resident and a short-term renter is the next door neighbor no longer has the assurance of reasonably-consistent behavior. The owner can even be well-intentioned, but let slip partiers through their screening enough that there will never be a season when the next door neighbor doesn't have to work with the police on a noise complaint. Always with new people they've never met before so there is no common base to work from.
Every time a short-term renter comes through, there is a nearly-imperceptible increase in the risk to the surrounding residences. Even in places where neighbors barely know each other, knowing by sight still represents a kind of commons. Even discounting the crime risk, there is the natural human instinct to put up your guard around "the other"; there is a small element of stress raised around this constant flow of short-term renters through a residential area. Years of crime data definitely prove relative anonymity raises risk profiles, but no hard metrics have been teased out of that to my knowledge, sufficiently to allow us to build predictive models around short-term renter effects.
It is easy to flippantly say the courts will handle these issues, but that is a tacit acknowledgement that the issues are a systemic pattern, not one-off freak occurrences that fall way off the edge of a Monte Carlo chart. When it is a pattern, then that is a cost externalization by the business. I'm seeing a lot of this behavior by businesses of all stripes, trying to gain an edge by monetizing any behavior that cannot be readily accounted for, especially in individual cases, yet in aggregate over time yield benefits to the business with asymmetrical costs borne by bystanders. This concentrated-benefits-dispersed-costs problem has been discussed [1], but to my knowledge no definitive solution exists yet, and in this case the challenge is even greater because the costs like increased, inconsistent and chronic stress, are difficult to assess.
Constantly amazed by how many people rock up here, like clockwork, to defend an the unlimited take on this business model: "Oh, it's just the hotel industry that hates this", "If only we just built like crazy Airbnb wouldn't be a problem". Riiiight, all we need to do is live in unregulated megacities and the magic of the market will deliver.
Here's the thing: a lot of people out there bought homes and apartments in countries that had these funny things called 'laws', where they expected that they were going to live in communities, not surrounded by rentiers running random hotels sans staff and regulation. A lot of apartment buildings in Sydney are essentially now completely fucked by this - you buy an apartment and find out you're living in party central and your neighbours are a never-ending collection of randos.
I think it's pretty clear from the extent that these companies go to obfuscate the actual addresses of the houses that they are not working with clean hands here. That aspect of the business model should be flat out illegal. Oh, you're going to operate a hotel, but you're not going to tell anyone where it is?
AirBnB provides an invaluable service. Without them, it would be completely impossible to move somewhere for a month or two to find out if you want to live there. Without AirBnB there is no short term rental market. No one outside of AirBnB will give you a lease of less than a year. I have no idea how people moved to other cities for a short period of time before AirBnB.
Before AirBnB, people would sublet their apartments - I've never personally had trouble finding one to three month accommodations.
You're correct that the extremely short term rental market (2 weeks and below) didn't really exist before, and AirBnB did streamline the entire process.
By all accounts the free market HAS delivered and any nation that has attempted to circumvent the free market has essentially collapsed. So yeah, as much as short term rentals are creating some unpleasant situations I remain firmly in the free market camp.
So, 'zoning' == 'communism leading to essential collapse'? Strangely enough, Europe appears to be full of countries that place all sorts of 'circumventions' on the free market and that have failed to collapse on schedule. More specifically, none of the 'free market' economies in the West have had anything approaching open slather on zoning and appear to have survived so far (not saying zoning policies are always good, just that they don't seem to lead to obvious disaster).
Suggestion: any time you find yourself having to lard statements with phrases like "By all accounts" and "attempted" and "essentially" you should strip out these circumlocutions and ask yourself whether the statement that remains is obviously untrue.
Free markets have categorically failed to deliver; competitive markets have been successful.
I'm starting to suspect that there's an intentional disinformation campaign to obfuscate that point. (Okay, I'm being coy: I'm fairly certain that people who dislike functional capitalism are using the term "free markets" to lead us away from working capitalism and back into serfdom.)
Only after booking was I given very specific and careful instructions on how to avoid any interaction with other residents or building security, entering and leaving through the parking garage.
During my stay I felt like a criminal, even though I quickly figured out that this was a pretty normal thing in this particular building, which was known for loud parties and inconsiderate visitors.
What a terrible experience for me as the guest and the people who have to put up with strangers constantly coming and going.
Airbnb is cool when we're talking about a vacation home or occasional rental of your primary residence - not as a clandestine hotel. I'd be willing to bet that most people, homeowners or responsible renters agree with that, Airbnb's growth goals be damned.