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Re:How Airbnb Earned Me $20,000 And A Restraining Order From... by cabalamat on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @01:20PM (#4074950)
> If your landlord was interested in running a tenement home/boarding house/hotel, they wouldn't sign you into a year-long lease.

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.

Re:How Airbnb Earned Me $20,000 And A Restraining Order From... by jack-r-abbit on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @01:52PM (#4075113)
> If I was a landlord I'd have no more problem with this

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.

Re:How Airbnb Earned Me $20,000 And A Restraining Order From... by jw_ on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @02:22PM (#4075287)
I don't think it's the same situation as somebody reselling goods you've sold wholesale. As other posters mention, running a commercial operation from a residential apartment brings with it a number of insurance concerns for the landlord, safety and security concerns for other tenants (which would also be the landlord's concern), and no doubt a host of other liability issues which I'm ignorant of because I'm not an NYC landlord.

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.