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[winjet81]

To fight back, hotels who are getting burned by AirBnB should start to have programs of renting rooms on a monthly basis at fair market rates.

 

[Zoe]

To fight back, hotels who are getting burned by AirBnB should start to have programs of renting rooms on a monthly basis at fair market rates.

I don't think most of Airbnb's successes come from month-long rentals.

 

[Gunslinger]

So Airbnb is the Amazon of hotel industry? Just like how amazon is slowly wiping out retail air bnb is wiping out overpriced hotels? Is that the idea of this article?

Off topic but can Amazon win against it's ultimate battle vs Walmart in the war to wipe out retail?

 

[Fuchsdh]

On my trip to Europe I definitely stayed at the gamut from "people renting out their spare property" (an elderly Freiburg couple who had moved to the other side of town), "people renting out their rooms when they were gone" (a young Dubliner), and "this is totally an illegal hotel" (a Parisan building where everyone was a short-term renter and the guy who you actually interact with is not the persona on the page.) The hotel situation was by far the sketchiest, and if I were doing AirBnB rentals in the future I'd definitely try to avoid it.

It feels like without stronger regulation on AirBnB and the property owners using the platform to skirt regulations alongside an examination of why hotel prices are so high, nothing much is going to change.

 

[UnemployedVillain]

The whole "sharing economy" is a scam, people.

Okay, grandpa

 

[Amory]

The National Associate of Realtors wants to keep housing prices rising. Not to mention homeowners also don't want to their homes devalued due to new construction. There are perverse incentives at play.

Build more and relax zoning laws benefits everyone. However, neighborhoods and homeowners don't want this, hence NIMBYism.

People complain about capitalism, but it's not capitalism causing this. These elements are protectionists in nature. And ironically this is happening in the most liberal of cities.

My hope is that when AirBnB goes public, you will see disruption that the zoning laws and real estate market needs. It's still based on the 1950s.

Perverse?

Buying a home is an investment. Good luck convincing anyone (not just real estate moguls, regular people who own a single property as well) not to fight against falling property values. Especially if they bought into an expensive market.

 

[andymcc]

My landlord has an apartment adjacent to mine that she makes FAR more money off of than she does my rent. Like $200+ a night. It's always booked too.

 

[Rktk]

I've used Airbnb 9 times and one of those was run professionally. I am not going to stop using Airbnb as much as I would not stop using Amazon and Uber because it's convenient and cheap - I can't be trusted, that's why regulation is the only thing that can curb this kind of thing. I'm not against someone renting out their second home though.

 

[KingV]

We need a revolution in house construction to bring costs down massively but no one is stepping up, seems to be foremost a regulatory problem.

Depending on where you live it's also a supply problem.

In a lot of midsize cities, there is plenty of land, and plenty of people looking for homes, but so many builders went out of business during the recession that they can't keep up with demand.

 

[Kill3r7]

AirBnb is a symptom of the problem, not the source of the problem, that is to say, AIrbnb exists because there is a problem in the rental and hospitality markets. It shouldn't make sense that a property owner should be able to make more money short-terrm-renting a property on AirBnb year round, more than long-term renting a property year-to-year. Yet, because of the inflated price of hotels -- driven by something -- AirBnb's can undercut hotel pricing by more than half, with better units, in more desirable areas. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.

I visited DC for a week back in April. Hotels that week were running $300 - $400/night for double-occupancy rooms out in places like Alexandria and 25-minute trains from the city. There were at Courtyards, Hampton Inns, and other typical mid-budget hotels, with few amenities and basic rooms. Our AirBnb minutes from Dupont Cir was $240/night for a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom, full kitchen, dining room, living room, and the owner lived in the unit above us... It was an old brownstone right beside Embassy Row, with bars and restaurants within a stones throw. Now, while the owner of the unit lived above us, he was using a rental property management company to handle all of the work and you could tell... We communicated with two people who were not the owner, but the owner came down when we got there and gave us a bottle of wine and welcomed us, but he was definitely not the person we'd been communicating with.

A hotel would have been more than twice as much. We would have been stuck 20+ minutes from where we wanted to be, in suburban office parks without any restaurants or bars within walking distance at night, and we would have spent 2 or 3x as much as a group of 4 because we would have needed two rooms, no kitchen, no dining area, nothing else.

An AIrBnb shouldn't be able to undercut a hotel by all of the laws of economics that dictate cost:expense at running businesses at scale, but it does easily. An AIrBnb shouldn't be able to provide more revenue to an owner year round than renting to a permanent renter, but it does.

AirBnbs likely need some regulation, or, more appropriately, cities need to develop regulation that allows neighborhoods to prevent themselves from becoming just cottage industries for AirBnbs. But, something doesn't make sense here and what doesn't make sense is the inflated cost of hotels versus the deflated value that hotels offer consumers. Hotels, especially in desirable tourist cities, are increasingly not making sense: Many people don't want to stay at hotels, they're in inconvenient locations, they lack amenities that people want, and they're 2x or 3x the cost of places that provide those things. The question shouldn't be "How can we pass laws to make AirBnbs more expensive," it should be "what laws are making hotels more expensive?" Because if you pass a law that is going to make AirBnb's more expensive, then that hasn't fixed the economic problem, it's just shifting the forces that make hotels more expensive onto Airbnbs, which then opens an opportunity for something else to come in and undercut Airbnb and hotels, and then we still have the same economic problem.

Also, it's not a coincidence that the markets being disrupted by technology solutions like AirBnb, Uber, and other applications were all controlled by organized crime 40 and 50 years ago.

This disruption comes at a cost. I am willing to bet that airbnb hosts do not have any of the same overhead costs as do hotels. They also do not employee anywhere close to the same number of people and they do not have to follow the same laws and regulations. FWIW, I use to be a huge Uber fan, still am, but I cannot help but think that they are propping up an unsustainable industry.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

AirBnB should do something about hosts like these, before local governments do them worse

Also, hotel prices in US cities are way too fucking high. If I'm going on a job trip, I just need a small clean room in a central location. But in many cities I've been, that's nearly impossible to find. It's much better in other countries

 

[KissDaRing]

AirBnb is a symptom of the problem, not the source of the problem, that is to say, AIrbnb exists because there is a problem in the rental and hospitality markets. It shouldn't make sense that a property owner should be able to make more money short-terrm-renting a property on AirBnb year round, more than long-term renting a property year-to-year. Yet, because of the inflated price of hotels -- driven by something -- AirBnb's can undercut hotel pricing by more than half, with better units, in more desirable areas. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.

I visited DC for a week back in April. Hotels that week were running $300 - $400/night for double-occupancy rooms out in places like Alexandria and 25-minute trains from the city. There were at Courtyards, Hampton Inns, and other typical mid-budget hotels, with few amenities and basic rooms. Our AirBnb minutes from Dupont Cir was $240/night for a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom, full kitchen, dining room, living room, and the owner lived in the unit above us... It was an old brownstone right beside Embassy Row, with bars and restaurants within a stones throw. Now, while the owner of the unit lived above us, he was using a rental property management company to handle all of the work and you could tell... We communicated with two people who were not the owner, but the owner came down when we got there and gave us a bottle of wine and welcomed us, but he was definitely not the person we'd been communicating with.

A hotel would have been more than twice as much. We would have been stuck 20+ minutes from where we wanted to be, in suburban office parks without any restaurants or bars within walking distance at night, and we would have spent 2 or 3x as much as a group of 4 because we would have needed two rooms, no kitchen, no dining area, nothing else.

An AIrBnb shouldn't be able to undercut a hotel by all of the laws of economics that dictate cost:expense at running businesses at scale, but it does easily. An AIrBnb shouldn't be able to provide more revenue to an owner year round than renting to a permanent renter, but it does.

AirBnbs likely need some regulation, or, more appropriately, cities need to develop regulation that allows neighborhoods to prevent themselves from becoming just cottage industries for AirBnbs. But, something doesn't make sense here and what doesn't make sense is the inflated cost of hotels versus the deflated value that hotels offer consumers. Hotels, especially in desirable tourist cities, are increasingly not making sense: Many people don't want to stay at hotels, they're in inconvenient locations, they lack amenities that people want, and they're 2x or 3x the cost of places that provide those things. The question shouldn't be "How can we pass laws to make AirBnbs more expensive," it should be "what laws are making hotels more expensive?" Because if you pass a law that is going to make AirBnb's more expensive, then that hasn't fixed the economic problem, it's just shifting the forces that make hotels more expensive onto Airbnbs, which then opens an opportunity for something else to come in and undercut Airbnb and hotels, and then we still have the same economic problem.

Also, it's not a coincidence that the markets being disrupted by technology solutions like AirBnb, Uber, and other applications were all controlled by organized crime 40 and 50 years ago.

You hit the nail right on the head here with your analysis. I personally see nothing wrong with AirBnb and what they're doing. It's honestly not as big an issue as people make it out to be. It's the hotel industry heads basically shelling out money to lawmakers trying to kill a company that's drastically hurting their bottom line. They've milked a shady system for years and now that they are being one upped by another company they're shitting themselves and trying to do damage control.

 

[Gotdatmoney]

The main thing about Airbnb is it's cheap for people looking for a place to stay and it's normally cleaner with nore amenities than a hotel. It lets people travel for cheaper and has a lot more flexibility. Even understanding the problems with it I still don't see why you wouldn't use it if it's available.

Hotels in Toronto and Montreal are fucking expensive as hell and people don't wanna pay insane stay costs. It's that simple.

 

[Kthulhu]

So Airbnb is the Amazon of hotel industry? Just like how amazon is slowly wiping out retail air bnb is wiping out overpriced hotels? Is that the idea of this article?

Off topic but can Amazon win against it's ultimate battle vs Walmart in the war to wipe out retail?

Thanks idea of the article is that Airbnb is that Airbnb is taking crucial housing out of the market thanks to these long term commercial renters.

To your second point: it's not a matter of it so much as it is when.

Okay, grandpa

They aren't wrong. Companies like Airbnb and Uber ignore regulation and exploit their employees.

 

[Lord of Ostia]

AirBnB also provides a service at a fairly reasonable cost that hotels don't provide: temporary stays for more than a week at decent rates. For example, right now my girlfriend and I are staying at an AirBnB for 6 weeks while waiting for our apartment to become available. We had to leave our last place August 1st, but there were no acceptable apartments available until mid September. Any hotels that accommodated extended stays were 2-3x the AirBnB we are staying in, with less amenities. We are already paying over double what we would pay in rent monthly to temporarily stay here...a hotel would've been 4-5x that, and we cannot afford that as graduate students.