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Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by fredophile on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @03:42PM (#22949407)
I disagree. Do homeowners want to be renting out property on AirBnB if we still have social distancing in place? Professional AirBnB landlords are going to have serious financial trouble soon if they continue to have no or very low bookings. How long can they stay solvent? AirBnB could have a big supply problem before this is done.
Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by dorchadas on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @04:09PM (#22949654)
I also think local governments will see a lot of the apartments re-enter the long-term rent market, helping fix some of the housing problem... And then make laws to make sure they don't leave it again.

I know they're already starting to re-enter the market in Dublin, where I'm currently in contact with people about housing as I'm looking at moving for school, and I don't think the populace would easily give those back up to let tourists come run them out of their town and Jack up prices again.

Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by cactus2093 on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @05:08PM (#22950199)
> I don't think the populace would easily give those back up to let tourists come run them out of their town and Jack up prices again.

This assumes people value having greater supply of housing, and low housing costs. If this were true, wouldn't they just support building more housing generally? Yet almost every city tends to oppose building lots of new housing.

It seems like it could easily go in exactly the opposite direction. People seeing how hard the local economy has been hit, and wanting the tourism to pick back up at any cost. Homeowners see their property values have fallen, and want to reduce the housing supply to make them go back up. Of course, many people don't even believe in basic supply and demand at all when it comes to housing, so even this level of analysis may be applying too much logic to how the average person will react.

Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by toofy on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @06:51PM (#22951057)
> This assumes people value having a greater supply of housing... If this were true, wouldn't they just support building more housing generally?

I’m not sure most people (or most cities) are saying they want a greater supply of housing. I suspect most people want to keep the character of a city and keep prices reasonable by mitigating against vampiric tendencies of some landowners/horders.

Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by dorchadas on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @08:09PM (#22951510)
Yeah. From my experience, they're saying the want the housing in their city to go to them, not to tourists who are going to go and leave it in a few days.
Re:Is This the End of Airbnb? by lasgsf on Saturday April 25, 2020 @02:48AM (#22976205)
I actually think they will have a MORE inventory. The economic devastation of Covid will have people want to drive additional revenue stream and thus securitize their unused space.

So ironically it could bring AirBnb back to their roots which is grow with unused and extra rooms by individual homeowners/renters.