Why not just comply with the laws? I have a friend who did this, but in tourist-y cities this was turning into situations where a person would rent out 10 apartments at $2k/mo and rent them on at $300 a night.
A great business, but if you live in a block with constant travellers then I guess it can get super annoying fast.
Most places have some legislation that applies to short term lets. Those same rules should apply to people that try to run their Airbnbs like a business. Leave the folks that are renting out a spare room alone and go after the people with 5+ properties they've never stepped foot in.
I don't know how cities get the resources to try and enforce these laws. I guess if the fines are high enough, it could even be profitable but that probably comes with it's own issues.
Sydney used to have a problem with unscrupulous entrepreneurs who would (say) buy up a bunch of three-bedroom apartments in a fancy inner-city building, stuff sixteen beds into it, and rent the beds out to foreign backpackers for (say) fifteen bucks a night. For the backpackers, it was better than the regular hostels, and for the owners it was a license to print money, but for the other residents of the building, who would find the pool and gardens filled with drunk poms at all hours of day and night, it was pretty annoying. Eventually I think they came up with some new law to stop it.
Anyway, if airbnb is smart they should try to stop people from abusing their system by trying to set up pseudo-hotels, since it's these people who are going to bring down the regulatory hammer on the entire system.
This kind of lettings are a PITA for the neighbours, with or without AirBnB. I used to live in a city with high level of tourism and the apartment next door was rented in a short term fashion. Sometimes the people was nice, others they were noisy, there's nothing AirBnB or the owner can really do apart from removing the people form the property if they are breaking the law or community rules.
Taxes and laws are a totally different beast here.
Regardless of whether the law is justified or not, it should be very simple for Airbnb to force compliance to these laws. In other words, it should be simple for Airbnb to see a person having multiple properties within this district/city and not allow it if it's against the law, or limit the number of days a person can rent a properly out. However, Airbnb doesn't seem to do this.
Airbnb is a great platform, which I've used both domestically (in USA) and internationally, and I really appreciate what it offers. What I don't understand is the flaunting of laws by saying it's not their problem, that they shouldn't police their users and that their users are responsible for what they do. I can understand the argument, but it's not difficult to handle these cases and Airbnb should really do more (arguably their due diligence) to handle them.
I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero.
I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move.
Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities.
I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, though. AirBnB hosts are doing hospitality business without having to obey any hospitality law. Also there are a lot of black sheep that occupy multiple flats in best locations so people that actually want to live there don't find a place to live. And the company AirBnB doesn't do anything about that as they only see the money rolling in.
There's rules and regulations against it, for one. Should locals be allowed to do whatever they want on their property with no regards to how it will impact neighbours and local economy? There's a reason we have zoning laws, etc, in place. There's lots of things we stop locals from doing because it's for the better of the community as a whole, and renting out short-term to tourists should be one (and, again, it sometimes already is but AirBnB allows them to skirt the regulations).
This is the law in NYC and I still see entire apartments listed on my block every time I check Airbnb. It is very hard to enforce because you need someone to complain, then the police have to catch visitors 'in the act,' and then you have to go through the whole fining and prosecution process.
A very touristy city near me offers a fixed number of permits to property owners to offer short-term rentals out of their non-primary residences homes, and somewhat recently increased the number of permits they hand out.
Some places are banning operations like airbnb, and others are embracing them with the aim of controlling the downsides.
Apartment owners in general don't like to allow subletting or renting because it makes things like liability and property insurance claims tricky if anything should go wrong, and people tend to like neighbors more than they do strangers walking around outside their door.
The measures were put in place to prevent building owners from turning their apartment complexes into unregulated hotels to avoid paying additional taxes. Because those hotels were unregulated anyway, they often were in a lax state, and so health and safety also became an issue.
Conversely, per Airbnb's quote, 87% of the rooms listed on the site are people's own homes of which they rent out a portion, or the whole thing for a limited time they rent out. So these are not people trying to circumvent the tax law (and by all means tax their Airbnb income as a hotel would be), they are just trying to make additional income to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Those 87% were not the target of the law, because this model did not exist at the time.
This sounds more like your own personal paranoia than any sort of rational argument agains Airbnb. The fact that you might have visitors from all over the world passing through the area only enriches the culture and worldliness. To assume that a bunch of tourists paying $150 or more a night will result in increased crime sounds baseless
I just want to say, I live in a country where there are laws for and against almost everything, where most Airbnb listings are basically illegal, yet the city I live in is one of the top Airbnb destination.
What I mean, is that laws are useless if there is no means to for them to be seriously enforced, which is the case where I live.
On the other hand, if I were to create my own Airbnb website in that same country, I'd be shut down by the end of the week and put in jail facilitating illegal renting listings, while Airbnb executives risk absolutely nothing since they live in USA.
I once lived in Amsterdam and during summer, my neighbourhood was overrun with loud Airbnb tourists coming and going at all hours of the night. As a resident it was an impossible situation for 2-3 months each year. I ended up leaving over it, it was affecting my ability to to my job. I learned (the hard way) why regulations and building codes exist.
Not sure why the Parent was downvoted. These are some legitimate questions. Cities regulate the areas in which business can occur, tax businesses differently than individuals and have regulations on food and hospitality for health and safety reasons. As the parent says most of the time this will slip through as "letting a mate stay the night" but at $4500 a month we are in a different ballgame.
Well, for a start, if you buy or rent an apartment in a nice quiet building, you didn't sign up for one of your neighbours deciding to run a hotel with strangers coming and going at all hours.
Regulation prevents people getting profits by externalizing their costs onto others without their consent.
A great business, but if you live in a block with constant travellers then I guess it can get super annoying fast.
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