Categorically not true. Chris is a good friend, and he had a long term roommate until recently. He took on the lease because he knew they could cover rent whether or not the third room got let out. It is an amazing apartment in an awesome building, and his involvement in airbnb is not cynical or presumptuous. His listing was great value and he is an excellent host. I met him through airbnb and am incredibly grateful for it. So, try not to presume.

Illegal transactions are often great value.

There's a lot of people trying to rent out rooms on AirBnB now, and many of them think it's a "small issue," as likely to be ignored as, say, hosting a close friend for a month or two while they're looking for a flat after an explosive breakup. But it appears that a typical landlord disagrees with that opinion, and some shout-outs to that effect might be really helpful.

"When I delivered my rent at the beginning of the next month, I found the management company’s office under construction. It's now a hotel. The “loft-style” rooms are now listed on Airbnb for $169 a night."

Is this how airbnb was intended to be used? Isn't the point of a bed and breakfast-style experience the small-scale feel that the author described? Are guests really going to get the same attention/enjoyment out of airbnb if it's more-or-less a run of the mill hotel experience? Also, aren't there different regulations in place for rentals vs. hotels? The property manager may be violating laws as well.

to: Fred Wilson

date: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:00 PM

subject: airbnb already spreading to pros

I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's a continuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they just moved one step further along it.

[link to an airbnb user]

This is after only a few months. I bet you they will get hotels eventually. It will start with small ones. Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point (in size of chain) at which it stops? Once something becomes a big marketplace, you ignore it at your peril.

--pg

http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html

NYC hotel laws are strict. Its very possible what the landlord is doing is illegal. If the OP was staying in his room, may be it qualified as a bed & breakfast. I don't think the landlord would meet that qualification.

That the market is expanding is not surprising. There are a lot of empty bedrooms around. We've yet to see someone doing this with their foreclosed property but I'm sure that will happen too. Like Ebay, AirBnB seems to have a 'let the user do what they will and let whomever thinks they are harmed go after them.' A good example of this was the way software companies responded to people selling old copies of software on eBay or enterprise gear that normally requires a service contract. It may start a sort of 'race to the bottom' for some folks, we'll have to wait and see.

It's critical to the landlord to have it on the record that he was running a pseudo-roominghouse out of his apartment in order to evict him later.

Otherwise, you get held up in housing court.

In addition to all of that, often codes simply don't allow boarding houses, regardless of who is running them. One of our renters tried to run a boarding house without our knowledge, and when the police were called to one of their parties, the city threatened to levy considerable fines against us for running a boarding house, regardless of whether we were actually running it or getting any money from the tenants.

By the sound of this place, the landlord could probably do quite well out of airbnb. But in that case, why not just approach the guy and cut a deal or explain that he wants him out to rent the place himself?

Seriously, this is flippin' AirBnB, not the slaughterhouse industry. I only asked you to think about the costs, not to roll everything back. Is this a knee-jerk reaction to straw-man arguments which you happen to imagine coming from your least-favorite Republicans, or what?

If you want a more closely related set of laws, look at tenement housing. The Jungle was not the only example of an industry that badly needed reform.

Labor laws protect the needy and powerless, taxes pay for schools and city services, permits keep us safe and hold businesses accountable if they fuck customers over or violate things like heath codes...

In the situation of AirBnB, the externalities are imposed on all the other residents of the building and the neighborhood who signed up for apartment leases on the assumption that random people would not be coming and going. The value that accrues to the AirBnB host is generated partially by the loss of value to his neighbors. So what you have is not a creation of value, but rather the opportunistic transfer of value.

Hmmm. I'm not sure that it's so easy for courts to take on all these cases. I'm especially worried that it's too much burden on individuals to defend their rights. Maybe we should try to find a consensus on what's OK and have the police hand out tickets?

And this is a specific occasion to see the costs. Most occasions you won't get to see the costs. They'll be behind the veil of obscurity and all you'll actually see is a bunch of (possibly self-interested) Republicans talking about abstractions, if the costs are mentioned at all.

Perhaps now that we are better enabled by technology we can get all or substantially all of the benefits with fewer costs in the future? Then everyone can be happy happy freedom joy double rainbow all across the sky puppy-kisses. For srsly. :)

okay i'm done here. :)

Face it, AirBnB is just the next hiding place for illegal rentals after tax and zoning officials caught on to vrbo. I don't understand how so many people think that they can turn the property under their control (owned or rented) into a business without liability or regulation. Just write the word taxi on your car, pick up some fares, and see what happens.

Why let such silly things as laws stand in the way of profit? Who cares if someone else gets hurt...

Couldn't the landlord just up the rent? That way, presumably everyone would be happy.

I don't buy your innocence here. I've been leasing houses for ~10 years now during and after college. The leases have always required a mix of landlord approval for subletting, banned running a business from the house, and prohibited occupation by non-lessees.

Here are two clauses from an older lease[1] I happen to have in my desk:

* Tenant shall not assign this Agreement, or sub-let or grant any license to use the Premises or any part thereof without prior written consent of Landlord.

* The premises shall be used and occupied by Tenant and Tenant's immediate family... exclusively, as a private single family dwelling.

Your faux innocence is pretty annoying actually. You were abusing the property for commercial purposes and you're surprised he didn't give you a friendly phone call?

1 Looks like the lease was originally snatched from www.academichomes.com/downloads/ExampleLeaseAgreement2.doc

OP would be 'abusing' the property if he were running a crack den. I see no problem with tenants doing whatever they want with the property that they are leasing - as long as no damage is done & neighbors are not troubled.

That's why landlords define "damage [being] done" and "neighbors [being] troubled" in a legally binding contract called a lease, and when you break that contract, you can get evicted.

I strongly suspect most resistance to these basic facts in this thread is typical Airbnb/pg/HN apologia. It certainly isn't coming from anyone who has rented in NYC, that's for sure.

I don't find it that hard to believe that someone would blindly sign a lease after only quickly skimming over the important bits and then never look at it again. I remember one landlord looking quite surprised when I sat in his office and read all 8 pages of the contract, asked for clarifications on a couple of points and asked for one clause to be changed. It seemed to me that she'd never seen anybody do that before.

When said person is making a fulltime income solely from renting space in an apartment that he is only leasing, well, "most people" would think "I should probably take a look at my lease first"...

I don't find that hard to believe either.

What I find revolting is someone not reading the lease, violating it, then playing the victim.

Now that you were cranking tons of guests through for personal gain, you were surprised when your landlord took exception. If I found out that somebody was blatantly disregarding the rental agreement they'd signed with me for commercial gain, they would not be getting a friendly "hey brother, can you please stop?" phone call either.

Read leases before you sign them in the future.

He signed an agreement with another party saying he would not do what he ended up doing, for profit. How are you equating that with the landlord collecting rent?

Maybe if the landlord signed an agreement with one rent price, then started charging a higher price, you could equate the two behaviours.

for the reason I stated, someone to look after the place while multiple Airbnb guests come and go. Otherwise you'll need to pay for a cleaner and check the place every time someone stays. That middleman is taking a lot of the pain of managing a property away from the landlord.

Has anyone here ever rented?!

If I was his landlord, I would have more than enough leverage with the breech of contract to get him to sign a new similar contract, this one charging maybe 2 times more rent. The landlord gets paid more, which in turn covers his slightly higher (or possible the same) landlords insurance and then some. The landlord lets his tenant do what he's good at (maintain a sterling Airbnb profile and choose good renters) and the landlord takes a larger cut. Worst case scenario, his tenant doesn't take the deal and the landlord proceeds to kick the tenant out for breech of contract (could possibly lead to a court battle, but breech of contract is a pretty cut and dry phenomenon and the contract most likely has breech of contract clauses built into it) and do was he was going to do anyway (rent it out through Airbnb or otherwise).

As it stands the landlord will be throwing money at lawyers (possibly covered by landlords insurance, but could effect the premiums later), which may not turn out favorably for the landlord in court, to ultimately do something that is outside his area of expertise (act as an Airbnb hotel himself).

That's what I think at least.

He seems quite aware of his position.

But they aren't running a hotel (their tenant is), so what're they complaining about?

If I was a landlord I'd have no more problem with this than if I was a wholesaler whose customers resold the stuff retail.

Until you are a landlord, you can't really say for sure what you'd do as a landlord. I just recently started renting out my house. Going into it I was all "as long as they pay the rent on time and don't trash the place, I don't really care who rents it". But then I started getting into the fine points of liability and eviction rights and all the icky stuff you never see as a renter. And then I started showing the place to prospective tenants and started to realize how critical it is for me to choose the right people to live in my house. After doing all that, I would really hate to see the tenant let someone I know nothing about rent the place. And so the lease states they can not. The wholesaler -> customer relationship is not the same as landlord -> renter.

If you were a landlord who was an AirBnB fan, you could certainly choose to not include clauses that specifically forbade this sort of activity. This guy chose to lease somebody else's property and then go ahead and use it in a manner that was expressly forbidden by his lease agreement to line his own pockets.

I have zero sympathy for him. He got slapped down for misusing somebody else's property and rightly so.

    So, naturalists observe, a flea.  
    Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; 
    And these have smaller still to bite 'em; 
    And so proceed ad infinitum. 
        -- Jonathan Swift