What happened to Airbnb?::Financially, the Airbnb is thriving, but guests, hosts, and cities have had enough.
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What happened to Airbnb?
Good old corporate greed fueled by an unreasonable shareholders/investors expectations.
Also every single provider on airbnb is also an investor potentially looking to maximize their money. I say potentially because not all landlords are min/maxing entitled assholes.
They were never going to be big without breaking hotel regulations. It makes no sense why they’re big anyway. They don’t own any real estate. They should take 5% at most, like a payment processor.
It’s chokepoint capitalism, where you don’t supply, produce or consume, you just control the conduit through which people do those things.
Also though just owning property shouldn’t entitle you to an income. Fuck landlords in general, it’s just airbnb figured out a way to be even more exploitative.
Running an AirBNB is a lot more work than renting out a house. There’s cleaning and a lot more toiletries and furniture to buy. You probably clean the entire place more often than you clean your own house. You also have to communicate with the renters all the time and arrange to give them keys 10 times a month. Sometimes you do all that and the people cancel.
Stop trying to make “chokepoint capitalism” a thing. AirBNB doesn’t control prices on anything. Tourists determine what’s expensive with their dollars.
AirBnB are the chokepoint capitalists, not the owners.
And I’m so sorry you have to do actual work instead of just hoarding property. It must be tough when just having extra houses you don’t need isn’t enough anymore because chokepoint capitalists got in on your scam.
And supply & demand is completely unsupported by evidence. It is entirely an article of faith of orthodox economics.
- AirBNB is definitely not the only rental site out there. There are better, more specialized ones.
- I don’t have any rentals, I just know how much work they are. Can you find anything wrong with my description?
- Supply and demand is very easy to prove. Just go to any auction. The market clearing price is what someone will pay at the time.
You don’t have to be a monopoly to hold a chokepoint. The industry holds the chokepoint.
Your description was irrelevant, but also… cry me a fucking river. If they don’t like doing the work, maybe they could get some sort of agent to handle the tenants for them, and maybe the agent could get them to sign long term leases so they can vet them more carefully. Why not do that? Because that already exists and makes less money? Okay? Who cares? Jobs are work, here’s Tom with the weather.
Auctions suck for the most part, that’s why ebay mostly just sells things now. Look at the uproar when Uber does surge pricing. People don’t put up with it. Turns out that outside of a very few artificial situations like an auction, sellers basically just set prices, because unless they’ve specifically opted into an auction environment, consumers don’t put up with it.
Sellers can set prices, but for many things there are alternatives and hence more than one seller. Apple sets the iPhone prices, but you can substitute an Android pretty effectively, and there are multiple manufacturers of Android phones at lots of price points. If Apple decided to set the base price of an iPhone to 100k, people would not get mortgages, they’d buy a 500 dollar Android.
This holds true for lots of things, but housing is distorted by lots of factors. But housing doesn’t disprove supply and demand.
I am aware of the extremely simple story that you will learn in econ 101 - and sadly in more advanced courses as well.
It’s just that it’s only a theory. You should perhaps pay attention to the information you gave, and how you didn’t say, “observation of market behaviour bears out the supply & demand theory”, you just waved vaguely in the direction of a mechanism, with no reference to data.
If you look at the many studies into the matter where economists accidentally - and sometimes intentionally - did science on this, they found no actual data to support supply and demand as a model of pricing. It simply doesn’t hold true, and yet it’s taught constantly, and if you try to google this, you’ll just find publication after publication talking about the “law” of supply & demand. But it’s not a law, it is simply an assumption.
When looking at market behaviour and when talking to price setters, there is no data to support the theory, and nobody in the business pays attention to supply & demand. All the models that seem to work share the feature that they are set by the supply chain.
This article gathers the relevant information and has sources linked: https://strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflation/
Supply and demand is very easy to prove. Just go to any auction. The market clearing price is what someone will pay at the time.
Some markets are dominated by the buyers, others by the sellers, others change from time to time.
Oh wow are the basic responsibilities of the thing ppl do voluntary tough? Maybe don’t do it then ya chokepoint capitalist.
When I’m on vacation, I don’t want to make time for chores. Airbnb wants to charge me a fee for cleaning and have me clean up.
And the horror stories of cameras, and stupid rules. No thanks. I’ll pay less at a motel and have breakfast included.
Air BnB has destroyed the property market in my town. I’d rather not travel than contribute to the problem.
Enshittification.
Enshitty-vacation if we’re talking AirBnB.
Damn, you nailed it haha. Wish I’d thought of that one :)
I do still look for Airbnbs every time we travel because we’re a family of 5. Not a lot of hotels will accommodate 5 to a room and separate rooms means twice the price. Airbnb offers a lot more options for a family with the added benefits of a full kitchen and having a place that can actually be a short term home rather than a room with a bed.
Here’s the last one we rented: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/794199620391731129
I get that Airbnbs take some homes off the market and in some areas (like mine), that sucks because demand is high and supply is low. But they aren’t going to be the reason for a housing crunch. Here in Portland, Maine, we’re a small city on the ocean, thrive on tourists, have great restaurants, and are an easy drive to Boston or to ski resorts or Acadia. The housing market has been bonkers for YEARS and it isn’t going to change if we ban short term rentals.
False dichotomy. You can rent a villa, summer home, or any other non hotel accommodation outside of Airbnb. We used Booking.com for our last holiday, and the same place we rented was listed on Airbnb but more expensive by about a quarter of the price.
Many of these places list on more than one site, the business is the same, the effects are the same
Of course you can, but those are still short term rentals, so I’m not quite sure what your point is. Mine was that short term rentals are good for some people and probably aren’t responsible for housing market problems.
Do hotels not provide an extra cot anymore?
Fire regulations for almost every hotel limits the room to 4. They’ll give you a crib but not another bed.
Ahhh, that sucks. I never realized just how tailored everything is to the ‘nuclear family’
There are places where we can all squeeze into a room, and we do. It all depends on the trip and what we’re looking to get out of it. We don’t mind sharing beds and putting someone on a sofa, but it’s harder as the kids are all getting into teen years.
“AirBNB is good because I had a bunch of kids but I don’t like paying a bunch of kid prices.”
OP was saying Airbnb still works for some people today despite the many complaints outlined in the article for users.
Weird take, but okay.
Maybe ‘a family of 5’ is two grandparents, two parents and one child. Or another combination. Why are you assuming it’s three or more children?
Maybe a big family vacation being a little cheaper for this poster is still a lesser priority to people having homes to own? We can just focus on the part where they want things cheaper for just them and not the makeup of the family.
That’s not relevant to what I was saying, which was there’s no reason to assume someone has a bunch of kids just because they’re traveling with five family members.
Buy a new condo and suddenly a bunch of weirdos turn up on weekends. It’s worse, because only managed properties can afford he units these days.
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I’d rather stay at a motel with full cleaning and amenities than some bozo’s house anyday. At a motel I can just focus on why I’m staying instead of how.
A lot of this anti air bnb stuff feels like astroturfing by hotels. Sure there are plenty of annoyances, but everyone I know still likes them even if they like to complain about them.
The society harm is a real thing though. companies buying up homes to rent them is a real problem. But these articles that treat airbnb like it’s so obvious that no one like them feel very artificial.
We had the chance to stay at an airbnb when our house was being worked on.
We found that most of the places around us were trying to compete with Hotels on price.
Which is fine. Except that the hotels had more/better amenities… for the same cost.
I can barely trust some rando to drive me around to a destination in the city. Why would I trust other randos to let me rent and use their house? And not break housing or safety laws in the process? It is 100x more complicated than just driving me from point A to point B.
Lots seem to trust Uber/Grab/Lyft or whatever to drive them around. I don’t think it’s that complicated.
That’s precisely what I was comparing it to. Transporting somebody in a car for 15 minutes is much different than providing housing, a bed, and a livable space for a week.
Neither are that difficult.
My circle has all turned on Airbnb. It’s a gamble. It used to be the gamble was worth it because it was cheaper than hotels, but now that they’re the same price, it’s not worth it.
Last time went great, the time before was not properly cleaned to guest standards, and they restained the wood walls in the kitchen so the whole place was permeated with an awful chemical smell that kept me from sleeping. At a hotel, you can just switch rooms if anything is suboptimal. At an air BNB, you’re stuck. Everyone in my circle has had half good half bad experiences and it’s just not worth risking your trip over.
Annoyances? The last time I used AirBNB, there was literally no HEAT in the unit we were staying in. Just because it was San Diego in February doesn’t make that legal. We left and got a hotel the next day and I had to fight with them to get a refund.
That’s the last time I ever used the service, and I used to be a regular.
