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Re:Ahead of IPO, Airbnb achieves profitability for second ye... by longerthoughts on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @05:06PM (#18915945)
> they ignore regulations and simply extract wealth out of our communities

Can you elaborate on this?

Re:Ahead of IPO, Airbnb achieves profitability for second ye... by Zimahl on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @05:53PM (#18916422)
I'm not the person you are asking but I'll lay out how I understand this argument from what I've read about the housing market in Portland, OR, which has a big housing crisis right now.

Available housing, apartments, condos, etc, is being eaten up by short-term renters. The price of short-term rentals are more expensive than long-term rentals, but due to so much inventory not being free for long-term rentals, the price for long-term rentals has gone up a lot. This is the same inflation that we see in the expected vacation destinations but in non-traditional locations, like Portland and it's suburbs.

AirBnB is supposedly built to empower individuals to post a rental here or there. What has been found is that it has enabled and encouraged individuals and companies with large inventories to convert long-term rentals into short-term ones. And that 15% that AirBnB takes is simply passed onto the consumer - which then affects the price of long-term rentals.

Re:Ahead of IPO, Airbnb achieves profitability for second ye... by parthdesai on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @08:48PM (#18917607)
Ditto for Toronto
Re:Ahead of IPO, Airbnb achieves profitability for second ye... by rkul on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:17AM (#18919341)
Ditto for Prague
Re:Ahead of IPO, Airbnb achieves profitability for second ye... by pyrale on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @05:55PM (#18916446)
Airbnb makes no effort to control the legal aspect of people letting appartments on their site, nor do they give tax agencies the means to collect taxes. In fact, at some point, they offered their european renters to collect earnings on nameless credit cards from Gibraltar.

There is also the negative effect of renting prices going up, or having your neighbour replaced with 3-4 party organizers a month.