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A comment on The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor. Parent comment

Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by paulpauper on Sunday February 19, 2017 @09:15AM (#13679783)
Housing is a service, and landlords, who provide this service, take principal risk as well as pay for maintenance, taxes, and other costs. Why should those who provide such a service, such as housing, not earn rent for their efforts and risk? Developers buy properties in bad neighborhoods in the hope of improving and renting them, but without profit, where is the incentive to invest? It's a two sided-equation: for services to exist, there must be an incentive for the other side to provide said service, and that incentive is profit.

Regular apartment rentals often lock renters for multi-month contracts (due to difficulty, length, and expense of the eviction process, in which landlords lose money during the lengthy eviction process, when a renter rents for a single month and does not leave after not paying); air BNB, although it's more expensive per night, doesn't have such long time commitments for renters.

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Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by idiot_stick on Sunday February 19, 2017 @09:35AM (#13679889)
>Housing is a service, and landlords, who provide this service, take principal risk as well as pay for maintenance, taxes, and other costs.

You gloss over "other costs". Many anti-AirBnB people's concerns are precisely about those other costs.

It's evident in this discussion who are the people pushing the externalities onto others, and who are the people having to deal with them.

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Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by Sacho on Sunday February 19, 2017 @10:58AM (#13680255)
Can you give an example of an externality unique to AirBnB landlords that is pushed onto others and the others are unable to force the landlord into accepting responsibility for it?
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Re:The Rise of the Professional Airbnb Investor by throwaway_374 on Sunday February 19, 2017 @10:58AM (#13680254)
"Developers buy properties in bad neighborhoods in the hope of improving and renting them, but without profit, where is the incentive to invest?*"

Precisely, there should be no profit incentive. Society doesn't need lazy landlords speculating on gentrification. I don't give a fuck if you're disincentivised to own 8 homes which you can rent out while you holiday in the carribean. Productive societies needs affordable housing for all classes of people. Property is not an asset for speculation or a VC-backed venture return model. Feel free to invest your spare cash in innovation and businesses seeking growth.

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