The End of Airbnb in New York

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 561 points – The End of Airbnb in New York
wired.com

The End of Airbnb in New York::Thousands of Airbnbs and other short-term rentals are expected to disappear from rental platforms as New York City begins enforcing tight restrictions.

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A blessing, really, for cities experiencing housing shortage.

Have you considered building more housing?

True! Getting rid of these AirBnBs probably doesn't hurt things though. Now they might actually get a long-term resident.

It probably doesn't but you have to wonder why that company was so successful to begin with. I feel like we are celebrating a weight loss company getting banned.

There is a housing shortage, there is a hotel room shortage. Someone took advantage of that. Getting rid of that someone doesn't stop the next person.

I was successful because it's skirting (pretty blatantly breaking actually) rental laws and thus gains an advantage over the competition.

Well I think it was successful for the same reason so many unicorn startups are. They were bankrolled by promising angel investors marketshare so they were able to run artificially brutally low prices to dry out the rest of the market for years. But now investors are asking for those profits back and we're here dealing with horrible Airbnb prices AND it made the housing crisis worse. Double whammy, bb!!

A bummer though for anyone visiting as hotels become the only option, and prices go way up, beholden to moneyed corporate interests who lobby politicians in their favor and pockets.

Ed: just wow on the downvote brigading. Upvote/downvote is supposed to reflect whether or not the comment contributes to the conversation. Not killing the messenger when it's some info someone doesn't want to hear.

This is just very standard macroeconomics supply and demand, plus regular institutionalized political corruption.

Yes, Abnb sucks shit, and their prices are stoopid high, but that's the free market.

Ban them and watch hotel prices go up. Simple as that.

AirBnB is just as corporate and lobbyist bullshit as any other company. Arguably worse, in that AirBNB breaks the laws and then tries to get laws changed.

Hotel chains at least try to lobby to change the laws before breaking the rules.

Also, hotels are regulated in what fees they can tack on, and ensuring a basic standard of cleanliness and safety.

In my experience over the last two years hotels are either same price OR less expensive due to AirBnBs bait and switch pricing. The taxes, cleaning fees, and random add ons are absurd.

In a recent example, staying at some Yurt for three days was $248. After taxes and fees it was around $515. Like wtf?!

I’m at the point where even if the pricing was flat, a hotel is 10X less hassle to deal with than AirBnB.

Airbnb was nice when it was just a way to rent someone's extra bedroom for the night. I've met some amazing people this way.

Gotta wonder if the competition from airbnb kept hotel prices lower. I do agree with you though.

hotels are either same price OR less expensive

I don't think that really contradicts what they said though. It doesn't matter which is more expensive, they both exist within the same market and removing supply will make what remains more expensive.

Then the change is working as intended - residential buildings should never have been pulled from the rental market to compete with hotels.

Kinda related I stopped renting cars many years ago because of this stuff. The price says X amount of dollars a day, the bill says 2X.

The last few times I've tried to book an AirBnB the price difference from a standard hotel room was almost nothing. AirBnB has been trash for awhile.

I find AirBnB to be cheaper when renting an entire house vs 3 or 4 hotel rooms. But an apartment vs a hotel room is even or the hotel is cheaper

I agree. Family of 5 many hotels require us get 2 rooms. Plus no option to cook meals makes for a much more expensive stay usually. At least until a few years ago when airbnb went insane with the cleaning fees plus cleaning requirements and all that nonsense.

I think it's been too long since you've looked at Airbnb. Prices are no longer a deal in contrast to hotels. It's all inflated trash and no longer accessible for regular people.

Not only that, but you get charged cleaning fees, but you need to clean the fucking place after. AirBnB is a scam pure and simple

Oh no people forced to use the same highly regulated service as millions of forebears. Tragic.

Rather hotels be inaccessible than housing. You only need one of those to live.

People downvoting either aren't old enough to remember how bad hotels were, or are wearing rose colored glasses.

When airbnbs came to my city, after a few years, hotels finally lowered prices and made a effort to give a shit. I hope it doesn't fall back to that.

But then again, the past few years, Airbnb rentals seem to be run by shady companies instead of by homeowners with an extra room.

Airbnb has basically become "hotel prices, but the cost is hidden behind cleaning fees". Also, hotels basically stopped giving a shit after the pandemic. No loss here.

Good? Homes should be homes, not holiday lets for tourists.

Good. That was kinda the whole fucking point of Airbnb in the first place. If you want to own property for the sole purpose of short term rentals buy a hotel.

Yep. Just like Uber it morphed, from people sharing a ride or their place while on vacation, into full time drivers and landlords. Not the philosophical intebt of the original service, and it ruined it for everyone.

I mean Uber started as a black car service and wanted it to be possible for drivers to do it full time if they wanted. Neither Uber nor Lyft were ever billed as “make some money sharing a ride to where you are already driving”, the platform doesn’t even account/allow for that.

I fully agree on Airbnb but I don’t think the Uber example works.

I looked it up and you're correct. I didn't realize Uber started literally as "UberCab" and later dropped the "cab" and added the personal car ride sharing component. Thx for the tip!

Smart. People can still rent out an extra room, but can’t squat on an apartment solely for Airbnb.

That’s how airbnbs were when I’ve used them in the past, things like a place where you can sleep on someone’s couch, or a house with a spare room you can crash in. Those kinds of arrangements were way cheaper than hotels and very appealing.

The rent for regular apartments has basically doubled in the past couple years. You see studios go for $3000/mo, and 1 bedrooms for $4500+ quite often. I really hope this will have a helpful effect on lowering for the people who already live here, who can't make ends meet because of absurd rental prices and hikes lately. There needs to be more housing and reasonable prices for people who live here. Compared to the median income here (and not the mean, because it's not representative to count the billionaires), it's literally not affordable for the people who grew up here and started their lives here, to afford to have a roof over their head. That's why you see shit like 5 unrelated adults in a 1 bedroom apartment together, or a big extended family of multiple generations, partners, etc., all living under the same roof. Nobody can afford anything better here.

It is a serious crisis in many places throughout the world. Especially considering the income stagnation. I have lived in many cities and have heard this cry across multiple continents, from coast to coast, and at most income levels (except the ultra wealthy).

What I’m hoping becomes more popular are ways to make the short term rentals not as profitable. I really like the idea what other cities are doing by limiting the number of days they can rent it out.

Sure, rent it out for 45 days a year and get $10k total revenue and try to scrape out a profit. Or rent out the unit as your primary residence for the entire year for a similar cost.

It’s not absolutely perfect, but it will greatly reduce those willing to buy places to use as an investment for short term rentals. And that should put negative pressure on housing prices, while also opening up more units for primary residence housing.

Generally speaking, housing costs don't decrease without a major economic event. Positive economic circumstances that raise housing costs set the benchmark, and negative events reset those.

Isn't this quite a major event? More empty homes -> more places to choose from -> more competition -> lower prices

Huge. The short term rental housing boom is unlike almost anything we’ve seen before. Estimates put short term rentals as about 20% of the global real estate market.

If that demand drops rapidly, it will mark a major shift. Tons of buyers and capital will be wiped off the table.

I agree with the usual perspective that housing prices almost always rise over time. But this is an unprecedented event in scale, and if reversed, it will have unprecedented ramifications.

This doesn't need to immediately lower housing costs to have a positive impact.

Hypothetical numbers... If housing was going to go up 5% in the next year and this change causes that to go down to a 1% increase, it will have made things better. Of course, we'd all like to just go straight to lowered housing costs. But individual changes can still do good and bring us towards that goal without strictly accomplishing it.

I hope that these type of easily exploitable services just absolutely die. New York is the last place I would have expected to hear these type of services turned scummy to start to disappear, but I welcome it and hope it spreads across the country.

Downtown service businesses looking at empty offices due to WFH. "Well, at least people still come downtown for its hotels. Tourists still have lots of money to prop us up!" AirBnB gets banned, hotels start jacking up prices. "Well, #$%#."

I think offices into hotels would solve both problems, right?

Hotels require a vastly more dense plumbing structure, I don't think it's easy or cheap to retrofit onto an office building.

Hotels with dorm like shower systens maybe could work. I think something like a hostel.

That being said you cant charge much when you are forcing customers to share bathrooms.

Well, shared bathroom means zero stars so yeah, you basically can't call it a hotel anymore.

With enshittification and being one of the worlds top tourist cities of course you can! Just look what they charge for rent. Then LA and Chicago will follow suit ;)

Offices are different in the fact that they have way more interior space far away from windows as well.

That's generally going to be a hard sell, not to mention against zoning codes in many cases.

Who is having trouble finding a hotel room in New York City? It's expensive, but everything is expensive there.

Off topic but I always thought the airbnb logo looks like a dangling ballsack and their service fits well with that image, so I'm not the least bit surprised to see the company struggling.

I feel like this approach to Airbnb is the wrong way. They should pass laws to prevent anyone from owning more than 2 homes and one of the homes should be one they live in. Corporations shouldn’t be able to buy multiple homes to rent out.

Airbnb makes it way easier for people to find places to rent, instead of focusing on making the housing crises better by preventing landlords and corporations from buying all the homes to rent out they’re just making it harder to rent places… fix the system don’t just focus your efforts on making one tech harder to use

This move was entirely brought about by the corporate hotels in the area.

AirBnBs are not the cause of the housing crisis. Corporations, and especially those from overseas, buying up properties so that they can be rented out (again, not through AirBnB), are the issue. That goes for NYC and across the country.

This is a hit to my family, but we’ll carry on. We put my grandmother’s house in Queens on AirBnB three years ago. No stupid cleaning fees or asinine rules. It’s literally a family home open to people wanting to stay a few days. We only had it on AirBnB to cover the taxes for the house that’s been in our family 70 years. We’re not suddenly going to sell the house, so now it goes to 30+ day rentals or sits empty. I guess it will be easier for me to block out days now, but whatever…

Congrats on being the minority. You're not the problem, but many others are not in your position.

ELI5: why is having airbnb’s a bad thing? ( not local, not in the loop )

It applies to anywhere. The problem isn’t one situation. It’s this same story, repeated thousands of times in every city across the globe.

Bobby wants to live in a house. Monthly rent prices are usually around $1,000 per month in his home town.

Joe wants to make money by renting out a house on AirBnb. Hotel prices are usually around $200 per night in the same location. If Joe rents out his house for just 10 nights a month, he can make $2,000. This easily covers Joe’s expenses and puts the extra cash in his bank account. If he rents it out for 25 nights, he’s putting away a lot of cash.

When houses are up for sale, Bobby can only spend a similar cost as his rent. Joe has been watching his bank account climb and is ready to spend a lot on another house to put on AirBnb. Joe can make a profit even if the house is double the price.

Bobby’s landlord sees housing prices rise. Decides to either (1) increase Bobby’s rent to $2,000 - which he can’t afford or (2) sell the house to someone like Joe for a major markup.

Bobby has to move in with roommates and will never be able to afford to buy a home when competing against all the Joes out there.

translation, Hotels are losing to much business there

Translation: there’s a fucking housing crisis and people are still living on the street but some rich fucking trust fund prick can come in and buy up all the real estate and fuck all the other working class over.

Hotels at the very least are intended for mass population and are space conscious. Airbnb is a plague that is destroying our ability to own affordable homes because, yet again, the rich use their abundant, gluttonous power to fuck over anyone who isn’t giving them their money.

Translation: there’s a fucking housing crisis and people are still living on the street but some rich fucking trust fund prick can come in and buy up all the real estate and fuck all the other working class over.

Probably. But the housing crisis is not, in my opinion, a conseguence of Airbnb.

The question is: if you rent a house with a long-term contract (in my country a 4+4 years), how easily you can have it back if for whatever reason you need/want it ? If the answer is "not easily" then you have the cause of the housing crisis and the reason for the airbnb success.

Ahhhh gotcha. I didn’t mean for it to come off that way, Big Problems like housing, waste mgmt, water, etc are all very complex and multifaceted issues that are arguably primarily due to greed, and unnecessary/inefficient expansion of our race (cause is my opinion, not fact but claim is objective)

Much of the problems are always present. It make no difference that an apartment is occupied for a short term rent or a long term. As long as it is occupied you have mgmt problems.

Greed and bad planning are other things, but they are different from place to place, so I cannot say anything about them regarding NYC

Oh yeah, I think we can agree that mgmt is definitely one of the key issues as well as any number of issues that are compounded by other Big Problems like waste management and thus pests.