You don’t need to ban them, just make them meet the same regulations on safety and zoning that regular hotels have to
I agree. A lot of the trouble that Airbnb causes can be mitigated with simple regulations that we already have in place. Additionally, we should recognize that Airbnb is currently filling a void in the market that hotels aren’t currently filling. There are times when people want to rent a place to stay for a full week or a month and also not have to pay to eat out every night. Airbnb allows you to rent a place that’s generally cheaper for longer stays and also provides a basic kitchen including cookware and dishes. Hotels just don’t have that unless you pay a premium. The only other thing they offer, which I’m on the fence about, is the ability to rent a place in close proximity or directly in a specific neighborhood or town as opposed to whatever area has a hotel to host tourists. On the one hand, that’s super nice for exploring cities and doing non-touristy things. On the other hand, residents deserve some separation from tourists especially since they don’t all behave. If hotels can find a way to fill these gaps, then I’d be ok with banning Airbnb. But we can also just regulate Airbnb 🤷
I feel like several advantages of Airbnb comes specifically from the lack of regulation. I’m speculating, but I imagine installing kitchens and maintaining them costs quite a lot as a hotel, with probably stricter and more expensive regulations compared to an Airbnb. I wouldn’t be surprised if Airbnbs were regulated similarly to hotels, that they’d be priced higher due to all the costs. It doesn’t make sense to me that a hotel, with 10s or hundreds of units, where not all units have to be rented out at once, is more expensive than a single property home where the whole unit must be rented out at once, and it takes up a bigger space. not to mention the inefficiency of repairs, and cleaning.
You might be right on the potential cost, but aren’t all Residence Inns basically this? I don’t think they cost that much more than other hotels.
It’s not the regulations, generally. Hotels are simply more cost effective for corporate management and ROI. If you want to make 20-25% a year you maximize units and minimize land expense and labor to manage. That it costs $10-30M is not a barrier to entry for a large corporation. AirBnB is less profitable but has substantially lower barriers to entry, especially if you lie about owner occupied status (which nearly all do when starting it).
The regulatory angle only really gets put in play because the land is cheaper due to improper zoning (residential is less expensive than commercial) and if the owners are dodging taxes.
Putting up private rooms/homes for short term vacation rentals is nothing new and has been a thing since long before Airbnb. They have the same regulations as any private lease, which differ from commercial regulations for the same reason why your parents house doesn’t have lit exit signs and wheelchair ramps.
I think the convenience and the swollen price tag of Airbnb offers particular issue. In my mind Airbnb exploits an issue with a lack of landlords not offering leases with full year of commitment requirements. Nobody is forcing a landlord to set a minimum year of occupancy, that’s just the culture we have. That additional markup for having a short term rental is what incentivizes the market to pledge houses towards people who want to travel on a budget.
When I was living in Japan it was fairly normal to find short term rentals that were basically just regular rentals. You weren’t charged hotel prices for them, they cost the same as every other rental just you basically gave them a ballpark for how long you intended to stay as a courtesy to them or gave your month’s moving notice as needed. If you wanted to just keep staying there as a regular renter that was normal too. There were even small businesses that served as convenient rental realtors who smoothed the process between owners and renter so you could set things up by phone or email to take the key and possession of the apartment.
Airbnb isn’t the only thing disruptive to the housing supply… It’s in part our entire culture of assuming a difference between short and long term renters and gouging short term renters because we assume that a low income person who is a short term leaser is going to ruin the places they live due to class prejudge. Long term lease requirements lock people living paycheck to paycheck down into situations that subject them to abusive landlords and the lack of flexibility means additional stress and impairment of freedom to move when something is desperately not working.
I feel like Japan would have an extremely different level of risk assessment - determining whether a temporary tenant is going to kick down the walls, smoke drugs, break a window, leave the place a mess, and have absolutely no credit to pay back for damages.
There is a different culture in regards to looking after shared property but it’s still not a full proof situation for them. But it’s not like those things don’t happen with Airbnb clientele, the resolution is just handled by their internal team instead of the landlord. You could very well still end up holding the bag for damages.
Most extendedstay hotel locations have kitchenettes, but aren’t that common.
Another way you could handle that is that any property you own after your 1st or 2nd, automatically attracts commercial property tax rates.
That should not disallow private individual to rent a spare room, or holiday home, but it will kill off the investment businesses that specialise running airbnb syndicates.
Additionally, if a property has not had a full time occupant for at least 9 of the 12 months in a year, it is subject to a wealth tax based on its value.
That should deal with the investment firms that just sit on massive stocks of empty homes and business properties, feeding off the increasing prices they are creating themselves, while adding no value and offering no service.
Taxing the owners will just cause the prices to go up to compensate, unless the tax is a very significant burden. Short-term rentals are way more expensive than long-term leases, and so they are much more profitable. A landlord can make three times as much money on airbnb as they would make on a yearly lease.
Yes, but when prices for short term leases are higher than the equivalent hotel stay, Airbnb landlords will lose money and potentially have to sell at a loss to someone who’ll actually live there.
Exactly the point I was going to make, but much better explained.
Also kick the CEO and everybody in his general vicinity in the nuts. This should be law.
Tough, but fair
Everyone who says “ban them” seems like they have never left the US. In Europe and Latin America, there are a ton of other websites that locals use for the same thing. Before the web, you would call up a few places listed in a guidebook and rent it over the phone.
I dislike Airbnb because it’s expensive. The concept of “renting a room” in a vacation area will never go away. But the idea of $100 cleaning fees, when they just change the sheets and wipe down surfaces (30 minutes total) is dumb.
We’re no strangers to it in the US as well, but what AirBnB has allowed is an industry of landlords that have strangled the housing stock in a number of places. It’s not the people renting a room in their house that are the issue, it’s the people buying apartments and houses specifically as rental property. I remember seeing a photo of LA that had AirBnB properties marked, and it was estimated at around 45% of all housing as being short-term-only rentals.
I live in a condo complex of duplexes in a summer vacation spot that has a limit on the number of units that can be rented out specifically to avoid this kind of problem - they want affordable housing for people who are actually living here, and not properties that are going to sit empty 8 months of the year. They don’t care if you rent out a single room or something, but we have a lady who owns a building who doesn’t even live in the same state. She has to drive like 4 hours to get here.
LA is definitely not 45% short term rentals. There are 13 million people living in LA. Where do you think they’re all staying?
Just ban them, they are no reason to exist in housing crisis. That or the owner must live at that address with no other addresses or leins on property
what about not allowing companies to buy hundreds of houses as rental property?
Focusing on AirBnB is better in my opinion because of the difference between the two.
A company buying a home to rent still has to rent the property, so they aren’t removing the housing supply. In contrast, a person or corporation buying a home to use as an AirBnB is removing housing from the market.
Companies should not own houses. Residents of houses should own their own houses.
Nobody should own someone else’s house. A roof over one’s head is a basic human right. Not an extortionate investment.
The problem with companies owning hundreds of houses is that they hire property management companies to manage these houses that were built by the lowest bidders and everybody blames each other when something needs to be maintained and the maintenance never gets done and the people living in the houses suffer because they are paying their hard-earned money to these companies while their shoddily-built houses are falling apart.
remember there are real actual humans hiding behind the facade of these corporations, greedy extortionate millionaires & billionaires thriving on exponential dollars from poor people’s paychecks, and this needs to be stopped.
But what about apartments?
Those should be co-ops/non market housing.
And if the incentives for new co-ops to be made isn’t enough, it’s time for the government to finance/build/zone for new ones. If the government just fucking spams medium and high density housing in the form of co-ops, bans corps from owning housing, bans AirBnB, etc, it would very quickly fix the housing crisis.
I’m 5050 on this. At least the airbnb is making money for people (generally) instead of a massive Corp. I. Reality both suck but I think I’d rather a person benefit.
I make a living cleaning short term vacation rentals. I also have no savings and cannot afford to buy a home. I’m almost 40 yrs old and never have I been in a position to consider purchasing a home. Rent is my life now :'(
I feel like the harm to a community of removing housing is worse than someone in the top 10% having another investment vehicle.
I can tell you that it is all harmful. My landleeches have acknowledged that the house we rent needed maintenance before we moved in and have done literally 0 of it in the last year, opting to instead use my wages to improve the other 24 properties they purchased in bulk from a retiring landleech. Then they have the audacity to attempt to illegally evict me and my pregnant wife when I start asserting my rights, and tell prospective landlords we are “problem tenants” who have paid every rent payment in full and on time for the entire lease.
No, there needs to be mandatory, city/borough-wide rental associations that have the legal authority to hold landleeches accountable. It needs to be mandated at the federal level and it needs to have serious teeth.
What about doing both?
Good. Sorry to every mom and pop who treated housing like an investment, but at least you still have the house. Hope they slash the market 90%. Hope everyone who’s been waiting for a decade gets a place to live. Hope opportunistic landlords choke and go bust when they can’t pay three mortgages on their tenants’ salaries anymore. Housing is a human right.
It’s definitely not going to slash it 90% to do that you’d have to make moves to guarantee houses are always losing value, much in the same way cars do, so that you have a thriving used house market for people that can’t afford, or don’t care, to buy new.
That means either implementing the construction of houses with materials that have a short life, or forcing houses to be torn down after, let’s say 50 years.
I’d prefer just getting rid of ownership of property, but i dont know if we are ready for that as a society.
This is basically how it is in Japan and why Tokyo is actually affordable to live in. https://youtu.be/d6ATBK3A_BY
Of course, this might not be implementable anywhere else.
“affordable”
Seems relatively affordable for a city considered to be one of the most economically important cities in the world.
Affordable, that’s God damn cheap idk what salaries are in Tokyo but that sounds pretty good.
That’s not the real reason housing in Tokyo remains affordable. The real reason is they allow developers to build enough housing to meet demand. Places that were small hamlets filled with single family homes 30 years ago are now very densely populated and filled with midrise apartment buildings. Good luck trying to get anything like that built anywhere in America, or most of the western world.
How about we ban companies like Blackstone from buying up all the auction homes, lightly flipping them and then putting them back on the market as overpriced rentals?
They’re a big reason for our housing shortage.
Why not both? Airbnb severely increases prices, and properties bought by corporations do the same. I’m tired of not doing anything because "what about "
Yeah I’d like to still be able to afford a goddamn vacation.
AirBnB isn’t even really worth it from a cost perspective:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/are-airbnbs-more-cost-effective-than-hotels
People are suffering by the millions as a result of the housing crisis, and AirBnB is contributing. So fuck AirBnB, it isn’t worth the price society pays. No such corporation or service should exist.
Freaking crazy numbers. It’s been years since I’ve seen a hotel room for anywhere near $180. I dont’ use AirBnB often, but when I do it’s because they are dramatically cheaper than the hotels in the area.
Try having to go to NYC at a few days notice ouch… Like all I could find was $150… I just rented a uhaul and used my gym membership… Just last year I could have been in a nice room in someone’s house for $40
Yeah. A few years ago I got a 3-bedroom apartment in Denver for something like $100/night. It was incredible.
Now…I dunno. Haven’t done AirBnB in a while
I highly doubt these prices. I live in Brooklyn and had to deal with a shit Airbnb next door to me. Their shitty closet was going for $400-$500 a night depending on the time of year. It was also absolutely miserable to live next to.
Meanwhile hotels in the area are maybe $200 at the cheapest, not really sure where you’re seeing $150. In Manhattan proper they start at $300 minimum.
I was mostly in LIC or the Bronx… I tend to do Jersey city now. I rent a private room so I’m not being part of the problem.
Granted, the above is more of a general trend then a hard and fast rule. The city and area you live in will greatly effect the rates for both.
At the end of the day I think it is quite clear that AirBnB is a net negative to society, and a huge one at that. So fuck em.
…which is weird, because at first AirBnB had a huge positive influence. Often times hotels had regional monopolies and individuals owned an extra condo… Like a match made in heaven the hotels got much-needed competition and people were able to do something more flexible than timeshare with their vacation/work/whatever condo
The issue seems to be businesses that buy property to use for the exclusive purpose of AirBnB
Agreed.
Ultimately, it’s just the nature of corporations to fuck us over in the end.
What about if we crowdfund a competitor to blackstone that rents out the houses at like a 20% discount to market rate and earmark a portion of rent collected each month for the tenants to have an equity stake in the property. Then more people would want to rent from us and eventually the vampires would lose interest. I wonder if something like that would be possible. Instead of legislating them out, we buy them out. But it does require a critical mass of people willing to set aside a bit of money that they don’t expect a market return on. But maybe if they thought of it more as charity.
Well, besides the fact that I imagine most people in the target audience would rather buy their first house than crowdfund discounted rental rates…
Do you pinky swear that once you overtake Blackstone , the 150 billion dollar company, you’ll have the same intentions?
That’s the flaw in the slaw, I guess. No matter how carefully you craft the by-laws, once it gets big enough, someone will figure out a way to hi-kack it to concentrate wealth.
“Boromir: But it is a gift. A gift to the foes of Mordor. Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the Steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe! Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy! Let us use it against him!”
Strider: You cannot wield it. None of us can. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. It has no other master."
Trying to fight and compete with a system that thrives on greed using its own tools and rules requires the ruthless use of greed to compete, and greed has a way of warping ones’ heart to continue forever justifying itself until its host is left an empty husk, having made a barren wasteland of all they hoped to save.
Capital knows its masters, and it will not be wielded by people who would subvert its influence.
You literally just described a Credit Union.
Damn it. Every good Idea I get, someone already thought of it.
The sad fact is that it is actually a good idea that should be implemented more often but the banks have worked very hard (i.e. spent millions on propaganda and lawmaking) to sow distrust in credit unions.
Sure we’re not thinking of a building society? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_society
The difference is somewhat academic and not viable in America under that name since most Americans are fairly stupid and will think that a Building Society is a meeting group for architects.
Any industry based on scarce resources or monopolies should be strictly regulated and given profit caps. Land is limited so corporations should not be able to monopolize that land for boundless profits.
This is less a meme, and more a screenshot of an article
Is there a political Twitter channel?
It’s bizarre. My house makes as much per year as I do.
propertys have more rights than humans
Now if only they would stop framing the dropping of home prices as a bad thing.
Don’t attack the homeless, attack the lack of homes.
Media has a strong monied bias. To be blunt: nobody is publishing or doing journalism for the “I don’t have a fixed address” and “I’m flat broke” audiences. You need money to get access to media, and everyone working there is gainfully employed, so it’s a safe bet.
And that’s clear in this news story. The framing for this story is basically “you’re losing money and you may not even know it yet”. Declining real-estate “value” means that 2nd mortgage is going to be a lot smaller than you planned. Or maybe you’re now upside-down after installing that hot tub.
Yeah, but don’t the Gen Xers want us Millenials out of their basements? I mean I’d love to, but I can’t exactly afford the nice luxurious cardboard boxes they have downtown.
As a child-free Gen-Xer, I can say that I got the exact same sentiment from Boomer parents while broke and unemployed. I honestly think my peers are modeling the same monstrous nonsense from our parents without thinking first. This is especially frustrating as now I’m hearing “come visit” over and over, despite getting the boot so many years ago. I feel ya, and I’m sorry you’re going through this.
That said I don’t wish this situation on you or anyone else younger than myself. You’re up against a whole generation that was neglected as a group, practically raised by TV, promised a world without rainforests and whales, a huge hole in the ozone layer, and all under the looming threat of global thermonuclear war. At the same time, MTV rebelled for us in only the most commercial way imaginable, and we forgot that was something we had to do for ourselves. The bar was on the goddamned floor and not nearly enough people tried to step over it. Fight Club was a call to at least take care of our mental health and we ignored it. We’re not well and, frankly, need to be put on notice.
I also maintain that anyone in my age bracket spouting this dissonant “get outta my house” nonsense needs their head checked. We have systemic problems and need systemic answers; same as it ever was. Gen-X needs to out there, vote, and support their damn kids like they never got from their parents. /rant
If you think banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis outside touristic spots, I think you might be in for a rude awakening.
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale. Probably lots of rentals with landlords not in it for profit, think Vienna-style.
All landlords are in it for the profit. They should instead do more condominiums, so you can own the space you live in. We shouldn’t have to live the rest of our lives paying rent.
Government-owned apartments don’t need to have a profit-focus, and can instead have a service-focus.
You’ll still be paying continuously for a condominium - there are plenty of things related to living in one of those that aren’t free. Having an ownership-focused model of housing and incentivizing as such comes with a whole host of undesirable problems as well, so it’s not strictly speaking a silver bullet. That being said, housing coops can under the right circumstances be a force for good.
True, but he means nationalized, so publicly owned, publicly funded.
Not only is rent there seen as temporary ownership (same in Germany), with really strong protections but the rent itself is like $300-$400 euros a month, barely anything for a top tier apartment that’s basically a solarpunk megabuilding.
I honestly think that’s preferable to paying mortgages for also for-profit banks and ‘climbing the ladder’.
The lack of ownership as an option also prevents the accumulation of such wealth that someone can buy it all out and make it all worse again
I didn’t even think about nationalized housing. Although I’m sure it will be lobbied against hard here in the US.
Most landlords. I was a landlord for a while because I was underwater on my mortgage, I had just gotten divorced, and I wanted to move closer to work. I rented the house out at a loss so I could afford an apartment.
So…instead of paying rent to the landlord, people will be paying a mortgage to the bank?
Gotta build more, specifically denser, and at a large scale.
This sounds like cyberpunk megabuildings
It’s more like lots of rowhouses and like 5-10 story apartment mixed-use apartment buildings - hardly a cyberpunk kind-of deal.
An interesting thing is that megabuildings only make sense in the most extreme of circumstances, think Manhattan-levels of location desirability. After a while, adding more floors becomes exponentially more expensive because of the new engineering challenges. Hence it’s rarely worth it.
My hope is that it wouldn’t be as bad as one might think. Dense living arrangements are more profitable for cities and local businesses and can allow cities to focus on infrastructure improvement and welfare. A problem with the megabuildings could be if they are solely owned by megacorps, but hopefully people will start looking into housing cooperatives to reduce costs and put more power in the hands of tenants. It doesn’t have to be like we only build skyscrapers either, but imo we need to have more of a gradient in terms of building height depending on distance to the city center; different apartment building heights have their own benefits. This is just my dream, though.
Except right now, we have enough housing for every person in the country. We just don’t have them filled because it’s not profitable. Lowering the incentives companies or individuals have for buying houses to keep them empty will ABSOLUTELY curb the rampant housing prices.
Buying houses to keep empty is mostly a land speculation-kind of deal, probably best solved by something like a Land Value-Tax.
Back to the claim though, I’m highly skeptical that the U.S would have a huge surplus of houses in areas where there truly is demand for people to live, i.e. larger cities.
This is an unpopular opinion especially with Americans. But, we are building houses for private ownership like it can be infinite but on a finite earth. This is inevitably rising the prices.
With the Vienna model, people can afford a rent and we resolve the prive ownership issue.
Is this what responsible governments do? I would have figured that Airbnb and the
gamblersinvestors in the housing market would havebribedlobbied hard against this.gamblersinvestorsSCALPERS
I only just now noticed that the AirB&B logo looks like a vagina with balls
Airbnbussy
Was there no housing crisis before AirBnB?
There was but AirBNB et al made it worse. The other piece of it is private equity firms buying up homes and using them for long term rentals.
“entrepreneurs” were going out and buying houses en masse to put on airbnb, turning long term homes into short term rentals with exorbitant prices.
There was one before, but AirBNB and shit like it made it magnitudes worse.
You can ban the company, but you can’t ban the concept (which has been around forever)
The concept is great. The company has caused untold damage to the housing market.
Why would you be unable to ban the concept?
You can. Look at what Singapore is doing.
Did sites like VRBO for vacation and large house rentals exist for AirBnb? I didn’t really book those at that point. While I agree airbnb should probably be replaced by hotels (like in the past) was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn’t for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a
leechlandlord - which is part of why we’re in such a bad situation now with the housing market.So like, limit the number of listings that one person and/or company can have (and for those with more than one listing, vet those more stringently)? This has always been a very “duh” solution; but they need to be forced to adopt the policy, as they dgaf since they are making monayyyy from it.
But then what’s to stop one bad owner from just making 15 different accounts for their 15 different properties?
And from the users perspective, there’s reasons to prefer that all the properties under the same owner are tied to the same account. If bad reviews are happening it’s easier to see the pattern if all the properties on the account have bad reviews.
Not that I don’t generally agree with you, I just think that it’s a complicated enough issue that just limiting the number of listings per person won’t totally solve.
more stringent vetting
Require a govt ID (and run that ID through a db to make sure it’s legit) for each host. Cross reference with who is the legal owner’s name on all properties; if company, base on the owner of company (avoids ‘I’ll just make 5 companies’ workaround). Even more basic stuff like ‘if more than 1 account is using the same bank account, flag for review’. This stuff isn’t hard, it’s just not in use currently.
You can get two hotel rooms if you have more people than fit into one room. You can rent bigger rooms from hotels too.
When I was a kid in like… the 90s, we stayed in this hotel room that was like… 2 stories tall and had like… a living room and stuff. And it wasn’t even a touristy city. I don’t know what that kind of hotel room is called, but it was pretty sweet.
I’m surprised more hotels haven’t realized that some folks want that larger rental experience and haven’t opened up more larger hotel rooms with kitchens and stuff. Perhaps it’s not as profitable. Or maybe hotels don’t want to hire someone to properly clean something like that, and hotels don’t get to force you to pay them to clean it after having you clean it yourself like Airbnbs do.
Yeah, I’ve seen those but not ideal. We have a group that gets together at least yearly with about a dozen people. Beds are needed but general living space that can accommodate all of that as well. I’ve never seen that kind of thing in a hotel.
a bit earlier than that, back when i was a kid… when we needed more space for more people for whatever was going on, it was always multiple rooms (adjoining, usually) at the holiday inn (in our town. only one with an indoor pool at the time) or at embassy suites (when we were in the cities).
was there a way to rent a large living space for a group pre-airbnb?
Do a web search for “extended stay hotel” or “hotel suites”.
Generally was a localized market thing.l as far as I am aware.
Things like cottage towns or ski resorts would have local companies that managed places in that area, taking a cut, but also doing things like ensuring lack of unit damage between tenants, cleaning, going after Olympians after they spin up a $400 phone bill to their BF in France while staying in a unit to train. (She apologized profusely and immediately paid the bill.)
La times article about it (may be a pay wall) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-23/palm-springs-capped-airbnb-rentals-now-some-home-prices-are-in-free-fall
This seems like a good thing. 1.5 million dollar homes aren’t selling well? Maybe cheaper homes or apartments will have better mass appeal.
I still think that instead of banning perfectly valid use cases of housing to lower prices (forcefully decreasing demand), we should focus more on just building more stock to satisfy all needs?
And before someone says “we can do both!” we aren’t. The majority of attention is going to things like this, and corporate investment (which is valid, tbh).
The more houses they build the more airbnbs there will be.
The reality is that there are enough empty houses to house everyone who needs them, the problem is that those who own them either want them empty as a holiday home they can later sell as an investment, or rented out, as an investment.
Because that’s what housing is today.
Which is why the only real solution is to decommodify housing, since it’s a human right and should be treated as such, while the profits of the rich are not, and should not.
I absolutely agree we need to decommodify housing.
I don’t think there’s infinite supply for airbnb’s though.
And I still think we don’t have enough houses.
If it’s not airbnb then it’s rentals at extortionate rate, but the bottom line is the same - new houses will just be used to make the rich more money, not provide more affordable housing.
As for not believing there are enough houses, it’s easy enough to look up, here are articles about it in US, UK, OZ, just to provide some examples…
Ironically the increase in interest rates are killing housing starts, so we’re not doing more housing unless governments start doing the financing.
Simple supply and demand could do a lot more if we backed off archaic zoning laws and permit processes
If you build more houses, what is to stop someone with capital using them to airbnb? Unless you are going to flood the market with SO many houses that airbnbs become too competitive to be profitable we end up in the same scenario. And that level of building seems kind of ridiculous.
SO many houses that airbnbs become too competitive to be profitable we end up in the same scenario. And that level of building seems kind of ridiculous.
Why is that? It’s simple market dynamics. Supply goes up to meet demand until they hit equilibrium. Works for almost everything else, why not houses? I think it would happen faster than you think, as prices go down and your airbnb is sitting empty for 3/4 of the year, suddenly it stops being such a good investment. Houses are only a good investment because we artificially made them into that.
Think through the market logic.
If I have capital and can rent out the house for anything above the market price of the house, I’ll do so.
As more of us do so, sure, airbnb prices might go down, but so will property values as they are now tied to airbnb rentals. (And, as airbnb prices go down, demand will increase.)
For the market to work you’d have to somehow get a situation in which tourists are not willing to pay marginally more than it would cost to own the property for that length of time.
(Or you’re counting on tourism drying up which seems like a fanciful dream.)
It’s generally more profitable to own something and rent it to others than to sell at wholesale. As long as tourists are willing to pay more for short term than locals would over that period, it’ll always be better to buy a property and rent it out. It’s why investment properties exist.
You’re ignoring a few things:
- Once we get beyond a certain amount of airbnbs, your house is going to sit empty, a lot of the time. That’s lost money
- Running an airbnb has expenses much beyond a regular rental, like fully cleaning the place, various bills etc.
Plus the cost is not directly proportional to airbnbs, as long as other things (actual people living there exist). Short term rentals are not a new thing. Airbnb just made them a bit easier and more popular. The only thing new is the housing crises
Once we get beyond a certain amount of airbnbs, your house is going to sit empty, a lot of the time.
Why wouldn’t the laws of supply and demand adjust the prices until I’m renting it out? I mean, heck, the minimum I can get for it is, by definition, the rental market (short OR long term.)
the cost is not directly proportional to airbnbs, as long as other things (actual people living there exist).
This is literally the entire problem with airbnbs!
As long as tourists are willing to pay slightly more than locals are to live somewhere (which is how we expect vacations to work, your rent is probably an amazing deal daily compared the airbnb equivalent!), that difference will always encourage speculators to use airbnb and extract that value from the housing market.
If you do rent it out, then that’s one less airbnb, and more competitive housing market. That’s literally what start started this debate.
Supply and demand doesn’t magically change prices to keep it profitable for an infinite supply, it does by actually changing the supply.
If you do rent it out, then that’s one less airbnb
You’re missing the point. That’s literally the lowest possible price you would ever get with an airbnb. As long as tourists are willing to oay slightly more than rent, it’ll be more profitable to not rent.
Supply and demand doesn’t magically change prices to keep it profitable for an infinite supply, it does by actually changing the supply.
You’re so close…
A) YES! There isn’t an infinite supply This is part of what will keep airbnb prices above rent.
B) When the supply changes, prices adjust until demand meets supply. That’s the entire basis of a free market. So, as the airbnb supply expands, sure price might lower but as it does, demand rises. It’s very hard to envision a scenario wherein supply rises so much that all the tourists are taken care of at such low prices that local rents are competitive.
