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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/" rel="nofollow">http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/</a>
2. <a href="http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/home-sharing-site-san-francisco-evictions/" rel="nofollow">http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/home-sharing-sit...</a>
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.<p>"You might have seen a story" my ass. Link to something if you're going to respond to it.
I kind of hate when people cherry-pick stats to be misleading, even if I otherwise support them.<p>The relevant number for NYC is not the <i>percentage of hosts</i> 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 <i>lot</i> of non-primary residences.
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.<p>This is Fox News level "science." This article made me slightly queezy.
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."<p>EDIT: typos & minor wording
"56% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco said they use their Airbnb income to help pay their mortgage or rent."<p>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.
They are referring to this article on Slate - <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airbnb_gentrification_how_the_sharing_economy_drives_up_housing_prices.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airb...</a><p>> 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.<p>Kinda funny reading that then the original article on slate attempting to make something out of this non-story
> 87% of Airbnb hosts in New York share only the home in which they live<p>Does this mean they're admitting that 13% of Airbnb hosts in New York are sharing other properties?<p>I was under the impression that Airbnb strongly denied such people existed.
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.
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.<p>I really hope the NYTimes and Washington Post don't go out of business; I rely on them to adjudicate most of my news.
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.
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...")
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.<p>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.<p>Just wait until San Francisco "Google bus activists" get a whiff of AirBnb.
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?
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.