I can't stop thinking that this was a top-secret hit job by some shady character working for the hotel industry looking to derail AirBnB's next fund-raising round. Heck, if Nixon could do it, why couldn't The American Hotel & Lodging Association?
So my question to you is: am I quite paranoid or merely rather paranoid?
Whatever you are, I'm the same, because it's the second thing I thought of.
But the first thing was that there are a lot of privileged young people out there whose friends might very well have thought a week of utter abandonment and breaking every possible rule would be the height of fun. And yeah, I can easily see that privileged young asshole finding it the height of humor to email the owner every now and then saying how nice the place was - more than likely laughing at how nice the owner actually found the place, if you see what I mean.
I've been a landlord. There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all, that will destroy your faith in humanity more quickly. Seriously. Even though the majority of tenants are perfectly wonderful people, and even though I only had a grand total of six tenants before giving it up as a bad idea, there were some that were just ... well. It's really like a bad dream.
This experience was worse than any of mine, and it was compressed into a single frenetic week of probable partying, but it's the same genre as one particular tenant I'm thinking of. She meant well. Her friends did not. And in the end, I was the one left with the holes punched in the wall, with the dryer stolen, with the garden shed piled to the roof with months-old garbage, with a kitchen floor that could easily have been a bus station, with evidence of a three-inch flood of water from the washing machine, with fleas in the carpet and holes in the yard after she'd signed a clear no-pets clause. (A friend and neighbor of ours owns several apartments in the neighborhood. One of the tenants she evicted had stabbed the refrigerator multiple times. Apparently on a lark.)
So even though it's more fun to imagine it as a conspiracy, I'm afraid the gritty reality is that there are people out there who just don't give a shit about who suffers from their actions, and who think it's fun to damage things.
I was recently talking to the home owner for the property I am renting and they told me that out of everyone they are renting to I along with my room mates are the most patient and most caring and following up than any of their other tenants. I actually care about the property, I talk to them when something happens, I follow up and make sure work gets done that is supposed to be done.
The homeowner was telling me about one of their tenants who they are currently attempting to evict, would call up and leave a voicemail and just about 5 minutes later would send an angry email and not even 20 minutes later have a lawyer call them regarding a simple issue (screen door broke, house has AC and perfectly good functioning windows). When they last went by the place it was packed full of all kinds of crap (à la hoarders).
Oh, yeah, my experience as a landlord makes me a fantastic tenant. Last place I rented before buying the current house, I was working on fixing the roof in my spare time - mostly because I really like to be fixing houses in my spare time anyway and, as we were in Puerto Rico, the roof was concrete and thus a really new and fun experience.
All it takes is just a teeny bit of responsibility. Landlording somehow filters out some of the people who really have none and drags them through your life.
I've heard similar horror stories from friends who rent places out, however it does cut both ways - for myself, despite going absolutely out of my way to be a good tenant, I have had landlords try to rip me off (several times), scream at me because I dared remind them that it'd been > 6 weeks since I'd asked them to look at the faulty gas boiler (!), etc.
I think some landlords need to learn to appreciate good tenants as well as to be wary of the bad ones.
Note: I don't mean to imply you, or even most landlords are like this, it's just that there are some out there and they need to learn how to behave decently just as such tenants do too...
Oh, absolutely. But remember - a lot of landlords aren't very good at it. God knows I wasn't. If they don't have a property manager, your boiler being out is just one more thing they have to remember, and can't, because they're just trying to make a little extra cash on a house they maybe can't sell - or somebody told them rental management is easy, when it's not. They may be working a regular job and simply can't get the focus for your issues. It sucks, but it happens a lot.
In situations like that, I usually send them a letter or call them, explaining that I know exactly what they're going through, and I'd be happy to arrange maintenance for them as long as they reimburse me. I've never failed to get a response of, "Oh God, could you please?"
Depends on the landlord, too. If you live in a low-rent building, they have a really high stress level for not a lot of return - it doesn't take much to set yourself apart from the jerks they normally deal with, though. Get on a friendly basis with them and it'll go a long way.
Once you've had a couple of the really bad tenants, I think it's very, very difficult to learn to see the good in people again as opposed to the enormous risk exposure.
You sound like a great landlord, to me it really comes down to whether they are actively acting maliciously, for example the landlords who screwed me out my deposit were clearly trying to steal the cash - one when I was at uni made up loads of costs despite us having spent a day cleaning, painting and getting the place spotless, another kept on promising to pay but then suddenly dropped all contact, in the end I had to threaten legal action (after a couple months).
> Once you've had a couple of the really bad tenants, I think it's very, very difficult to learn to see the good in people again as opposed to the enormous risk exposure.
Absolutely, I can understand that - sorry to hear you've experienced that. Seems unfortunately quite common. Who are these people?!!
Trust me, anybody who's rented to more than a couple of people has experienced it. Anybody I've talked to, anyway.
As to who these people are: it's a mixed bag. I keep wanting to write some kind of tl;dr screed here, but ... it's complicated.
I'll say this, though. I went to school with a guy whose dad was the manager for an American-owned automotive plant in Spain. They lived in a freaking mansion in Cadiz, although they were basically regular people from Cleveland or Akron or someplace. But he basically grew up a lot richer than me (and considered me bourgeois, but damn we were young and foolish).
He told me the story once about how he'd been depressed and visited a friend of his who was housesitting for their teacher at the American school there. I.e. another rich kid. So what this friend did to cheer him up, among other things, was to set up a target and throw knives at it. Except instead of knives, they destroyed every pair of scissors in the house and used the halves as throwing knives, you see. He laughed about how the teacher must have been perplexed about having no scissors when he got back from his trip.
I'm sure that he'd be mortified to know that I remember this story twenty years later, which is why I'm not naming names (yes, Mr. Google, I'm watching you!)
OK. So extrapolate that rich kid's behavior - and this was a good guy who I really liked - to our original post here. It's the same thing, just a lot more extreme. There are just people who think that kind of exploitation of the vulnerability of others is funny and fun, although I'm sure the vast majority grow out of it at some point.
It's kind of like sociopaths, I guess, as abused as that concept has gotten lately. I think there are those of us who would never have considered finding all the scissors in the house they were entrusted with, and tearing them in half for knife throwing. I'm one of those people. You probably are. And sadly, AirBNB is probably made up exclusively of that category of people. And probably the vast majority of users of AirBNB also fall into this category.
Now, one didn't. Honestly - I think the only way AirBNB is going to weather this is to have some serious, serious talks with an insurance provider and have some kind of blanket coverage they can extend to their hosts, perhaps with an additional fee - but they're not going to get through it with just being nice guys. Which arguably they are.
So that was really more than I intended to write. Sorry.
While renting an apartment the dishwasher broke and I offered to install the new one. The landlord turned me down and scheduled it for a time I had to be at work and took the opportunity to snoop around and accuse me of harboring a child that I had not told him about (in reality, my niece would visit a lot so we had a bunch of toys for her). He withheld the entire security deposit on those grounds. So it cuts both ways with the unreasonable humans. :)
Happy ending though, because Chicago has fantastic renter's rights so we got all the money back and then some.
What an asshole. I've never had anything like that in my stints in the tenant role. But honestly, that just sounds like he wanted to look for reasons to keep the security deposit and nothing you had done would have changed that.
"...came into my home earlier this month (apparently with several others, according to witnesses)..."
So there were several of them. If this were a hotel industry conspiracy, I think it would be very difficult to pull off this way. All you need is for one renter to do this. Adding people to the conspiracy puts your conspiracy at risk of being found out.
However, it's not too hard to imagine a random group of renters doing stupid stuff like this. Think about some immature people who weren't raised well and who are also drunk, on drugs, and/or slightly mentally ill.
tl;dr It stretches the imagination less to chalk this up to a group of thugs than to a conspiracy.
My apartment in SF was burglarized and the burglars used a crackhead from the park to act as a lookout and then take the heat later.
I don't think this was an industry setup. However, I would be willing to bet that the real burglar just did the physical and ID theft part, and then let in a bunch of tweakers to wreck the place and throw the subsequent investigation off track.
Joel might be famous in the technology space and maybe a bit wider via his Inc. magazine articles, but I doubt many people from the hotel industry care what he has to say on the matter. He's just posing hypotheticals anyway.
Second answer to the same question: while it's almost certainly not a conspiracy, it's equally certain there are champagne corks flying in certain quarters.
Because the President of the United States is a preposterously entitled individual, and Nixon is one of the few that got caught while probing the limits of that entitlement.
Arguing that something is plausible is not the same as arguing that something happened.
I thought the same but it does not matter wether this is a setup or not. What matters is that it could happen. airbnb can't do the same: sending somebody in a Hotel and destroy the room? That would prove nothing.
Hotels/dedicated accommodations are run by professionals and the business model is sound.
Airbnb is maybe too ahead of its time and will work greatly when our online identities are more "stable" if you see what I mean.
Right now it's like finding a good developer by asking my friends in Facebook because it seems cheaper and cooler.
It's not.
Hosting somebody is not as easy as pointing the bed and the bathroom.
It's way more complicated than that.
Safety is just one aspect that non professional hosts have troubles dealing with.
Disclaimer: I run an accommodation reservation system in many ways similar to airbnb and I love their idea.
But we are going in the opposite direction: only professional hosts renting places dedicated to tourists (they don't live there), local Managers meeting and selecting the owners, visiting the accommodations (I often even test them sleeping there) and supporting the guests locally.
It does not allow for fast growth but it's much safer for all the parties involved.
by finding a good tenant by asking your friends on Facebook might be a good idea - some form of social vouching would really help (even if it's friend-of-friend-of-friend).
It does sound just too ridiculous. I mean it's one thing to find the safe and steal credit cards, but I find it more than a little odd that he burned a spare set of sheets in the fireplace.
Someone elsewhere (in another related discussion on HN) suggested the place was probably used as a meth lab. They could have been destroying evidence or some such.
I think if the broader public knew about this it could damage AirBNB but at this point I'm guessing 90% of AirBNB customer base doesn't follow TC or HN and therefore will not be aware of the substantiated risk to their possessions.
Maybe after the 10th or 11th serious robbery/rape/murder then This American Life will make an interesting show about it.
So my question to you is: am I quite paranoid or merely rather paranoid?