This. They help destroy housing markets.

While Air B&B has done irreperable harm to the housing market, I'm not 100% convinced it should be banned. I propose if a house operates as an enterprise, it be taxed according to commercial rates, not residential. It would go a long way to resolving the inequities.

Yep instead of lowering rent because your unit is unaffordable you just buy up and rent them all out creating housing scarcity and prices will increase right up until the point ppl can't afford to vacation anymore... Which is pretty much now anyway. Queue up all the BS stories. "Millennials/zoomers don't 'want' to vacation anymore"

The Snake is going to eat it's tail.

Where I feel like they have a suitable place is for vacation rentals. Like when I was a kid our family would rent a house at the beach for a week as our summer vacation. The beach we’d go to had several real estate companies that would manage the rentals and published little booklets every year with the listings. The houses were privately owned, though, so as Airbnb and especially VRBO came along this gave the homeowners another option that was perhaps less expensive than the agencies. These are houses in a vacation area, though, generally not taking away housing from locals. This also was traditionally a family that owned one extra house for family getaways and trying to rent it out when they weren’t using it, not investors creating “hotel” chains. Setting up what is effectively a hotel in a residential area and cutting off housing from people who need it should be an obvious problem yet many people don’t recognize it.

yeah I get things like its the only option yet somehow people traveled and found a place to stay before it existed.

Originally, they did fill a niche. If you have a big group of people, a hotel breaks the group up into rooms. Airbnb lets you have one place all to yourself.

Nowadays it's gone to shit with low quality spaces, hotels listing themselves on Airbnb, stuff like that. I hope there's a middle ground.

don’t forget the rudeness of some people. they behave like the whole building is a hotel and they can do whatever they damn well please.

If it were up to me, I would obliterate this concept. Hotels are for holidays, not people’s houses where everyone brings along their holiday brains and are being generally disrespectful towards the communities.

It was a nice concept in the 2010s when it was like an advanced version of Couchsurfing or a digital version of a homestay. Then of course it became an unsustainable business model and went to dogs when it became a money making scheme for finance bros to buy up housing and charge 4-star hotel prices.

partially right, but its usually the corporate real estate companies doing this, they buy up the HOUSES and just air bnb, or rent them forever, without even selling any of the houses.

I think it shouldnt be on the consumers but on the lawmaker. Tax airbnbs like real bnbs or like hotels or there are many other levers that can be pulled to make it less profitable than renting to locals

It means there's not enough construction. If apartments were used as hotels, then more construction would offset increase in prices