>So have six friends buy an apartment and split airbnb?

I love how you make sound like it's no big deal to have six people split on an expensive capital asset like real estate, all to get around an AirBnB law.

Doesn't work:

1. 6% house sales tax.

2. BAG registry contains all address registrations in incredible details. Public data. More available for a price.

6% is insignificant compared to the 200% returns here. Anyway they could sell for a nominal amount maybe?

I don't see why it being public would matter: the whole point is that this should be legal since the owner is only airbnbing it for 60 days.

That's 6% every two months, so you're going to be paying 36% of the value of the apartment every year. For an apartment that costs, say, half a million, that's 180,000 euros a year in taxes. I mean, if you're renting the flat for 15,000 euros a month (instead of the 1000 it would actually fetch), it might work.

Trivial to verify addresses on Airbnb side.

> Trivial to verify addresses on Airbnb side.

Not trivial at all. Without even pausing to think, I could offhand list at least four different ways of writing my home address that would be impossible for AirBNB to automatically disambiguate from other (potentially) different residences, without actually visiting the building... but which would be perfectly unambiguous for a guest who actually visits.

Address verification is hard. Not impossible, but when you're operating in many cities and countries that have wildly different ways of organizing their addresses, it's not trivial at all.

Some countries (like the UK) have a widely used address registry rather than freeform addresses. And most online shopping services have figured this out (even multinational ones that ship to many countries), so I doubt a company as large as AirBnB would have technical trouble doing so if it really wanted to. The way it works when I order online: I first enter my postal code, then it shows me a drop-down box with the valid addresses in that postal code (there are exactly 16 of them), then I choose one of those. Online merchants like it because it reduces chances of fraud/misdeliveries/etc. (their contracts with parcel delivery services might also require it).

Agreed. The USPS also provides address verification / normalization services. [1]

Though I'm honestly not sure those are as comprehensive as certain other countries, as you mentioned. Germany has the Meldepflicht[2] for instance, which requires all residents to register their address with an Einwohnermeldeamt, and I'm pretty sure that's validated against a nationwide database. Granted, it's not granular enough pinpoint exact apartments (since apartments aren't generally numbered here), but still, I imagine that kind of thing would make it pretty difficult to bypass a law like Amsterdam's 60 day rule.

[1] https://www.usps.com/nationalpremieraccounts/manageprocessan...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meldepflicht

There is no nationwide database of that kind in Germany. The data is kept local (but there are mechanisms to access it from another place in certain cases). The address you give them is often not validated and many people have a typo in their official address causing all kind of mayhem.

I think it sounds like a good idea and I agree address verification is hard but is it worth the risk? I imagine this would throw out all insurance liability if things go wrong.

> I imagine this would throw out all insurance liability if things go wrong.

AirBNB doesn't offer insurance - it offers a "guarantee", which is legally different in an important sense.

In any case, if you're looking to rent out your place full-time, you probably don't really care about AirBNB's guarantee anyway.

Airbnb already has a whole lot of listings out there lying about the address because the people that put the apartment for rent don't want the building association to know that they are renting. They often just claim that the apartments for rent is in an office building in the same block.

Therefore, Airbnb doesn't really verify addresses at all, and lets people bypass any system that relies on this. This happens in major markets where Airbnb has people on site too: A good chunk of listings in San Francisco's SoMa are doing this.

Thus, I have little faith that any system to prevent breaking local laws based on addresses will go anywhere unless Airbnb does a lot more work to verify the accuracy of listings.