Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

insideairbnb.com

245 pointsw1ntermute65 comments

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers?

If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

Aside from what other posters have said (a better way to do this would be to note in the report the exclusion of certain data, and why it was excluded), the way they purged the listings is particularly damning:

"No similar event took place in other cities in North America or elsewhere."

If this were them legitimately cleaning up their listings, and not misleading regulators, you'd imagine they'd have taken similar action across their entire database. The fact that they only "corrected" their NYC listings before releasing their NYC report is rather telling, assuming that the data presented here is correct.

Generally speaking, altering your statistics to report to regulators will open you up to a lot of potential legal trouble as the regulators might well decide to take the view that you're deliberately giving them misleading information.

If you need to massage the date to represent what you believe to be a realistic view of your data then you still need to start off with your 'bad' data and explain why you don't believe it's representative and present your arguments for altering your data along with your 'clean' dataset. That way you can't be accused of misleading regulators and you'll have best opportunity to present your arguments for why your initial dataset is 'wrong'.

Your fiduciary duty to shareholders almost certainly includes not making yourself liable to having legal action taken against you by the government.

If regulators are investigating your business, they are already 'taking legal action' against you.

Now regulators can and in many cases often choose to believe that companies act in good faith when they clean up their data profile before handing it to investigators.

Without clear data, regulators can also assume that a company is trying to obscure the truth by throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a data set while internally only using a subset of the data because it knows X part is patently false.

While investigations generally could precede legal action, they don't always lead to it. An individual could be investigated for a serious crime and later be ruled out by said investigators as new evidence comes to light.

That being said, this should lead to legal action by NYC.

Note that this article is a reply to the statements made by Airbnb at [1]. Specifically claiming "95% of our entire home hosts share only one listing" when this is true only because you modified those listing days previously (to remove said multi-home listings) can't be chalked-up to naive data clean-up.

You present no evidence that the purged data wasn't listings that previous made money for Airbnb - there's no evidence it was "bad" in any way except making them look bad and the chart in the article seems to show it was corrected only so long as they needed to look good.

[1] https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in...

I tend to disagree with you. This looks shady, unless they declared the fact that they were trimming their listings prior to presenting the data.

The report is supposed to present the business as it is and has been over recent time. It is very difficult to justify making a whole lot of adjustments to ones business and then try say "this is the way our business looks - honest".

My thoughts, too.

Though the question is why haven't they removed these earlier? Were they waiting to do it? Or was this just a result of incompetence followed by a panicked response?

Could be it never mattered before, because no one was looking, and now someone is looking.

> Could be it never mattered before

If people could rent these properties before they were removed, how could it not matter?

I'd argue that's a form of incompetence.

Because they were making good coin from those listings

Except they only did this in New York. Only if they had gone ahead and did this as a global crackdown, that argument might fly.

There are better ways to exclude the bad listings from a report. The generally accepted way is to include them at the beginning and explicitly excluding them for a number of stated reasons.

This does however give an image that Airbnb is not perfect.

The thing is they aren't just "fixing the report." They realized they had to change their business model, and apparently purge a significant number of customers (who they must have known to have been in violation of NYC legal code up to that point).

To avoid, you know, getting caught with their pants down.

Seems reasonable.

Does that mean that cleanup basically never happened beforehand though? Since they got rid of so many in one go over that one month.

I understand for smaller corps, this sort of cleanup doesn't exactly make money. A bit backseat CEO, but for a company where compliance is important for its continued survival, I feel like that should be the full-time jobs of many people at the company to make sure there isn't a bunch of terrible listings.

It's interesting that the word "photoshopped" is being used for this kind of manipulation as well.

I took it as a humorous(?) play on the dual meanings of the word "snapshot". What originated as a term for a quick photograph[0] evolved to have a metaphorical meaning of "a record of something as it existed at a single moment". So using "photoshop" in this way is just a cute way of extending the metaphor (while borrowing some of the dishonest connotations of photoshopping as well).

[0] Or evidently earlier as a term for a quick, roughly aimed shot from a gun. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snapshot

It's just bad writing.

It muddies their actual meaning, and an unfortunate metaphor that gets in the way--does more to confuse than illuminate. These guys are onto something big, but they're not great at presenting it.

And before you know it the word is redefined in Merriam Webster. Literally.

For every "literally" there's a "really."

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the... http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.h...

Somewhat disagree. I instantly understood the metaphor.

It made me have to pause for a minute because it was adjacent to a graph. It made me think Airbnb had published a graph somewhere and that their graph had been altered in some way that could be described loosely as "photoshopped".

Maybe I'm just to literal, but when I read that I paused and wondered why you'd manually modify a report in photoshop. I'm now sure it was meant colloquially as "modified" but when I read the article I figured they meant it literally.

I found it fairly odd as well, then checked the domain, insideairbnb.com, what the hell? Sounds like some corporate blog domain. But no, it's not. Tiny yet frustrating detail.

As an outsider to the USA housing market (that seems to be very heavily regulated), could someone explain the significance of what is alleged here? More to the point, why are multi-listings of whole houses a bad thing?

(Note: not taking a position in this post, just describing both positions.)

Many people unhappy with AirBnB want to portray AirBnB as primarily a means for large-scale commercial landlords to circumvent regulations on hotels, renting, or subletting; such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation. A large number of people posting multiple "entire home" listings would lend support to that depiction.

AirBnB wants to portray themselves as primarily letting individual people rent out their own property or rooms; such a depiction makes it easier to argue against existing or additional regulations. A large number of people posting only a single "entire home" listing, or listings of individual rooms in a home, would lend support to that depiction.

The site linked here claims that AirBnB removed many "entire home" listings from their site right before producing a report, and that the removed listings disproportionately reduced the number of listings by people with more than one "entire home" listing. The linked site further claims that those removals only occurred in NYC, and the graph suggests that the proportion immediately started growing again after the removals and subsequent report.

Such a depiction makes it easier to argue for more regulation.

Or for existing regulations to be enforced.

(There's no need to depict Airbnb skeptics as inherently "pro"-regulation, and instinctively wanting more of it).

I'd intended that to be a broad statement: "more regulation" can mean either additional regulations or broader interpretation/enforcement of existing regulations. Either approach has the effect that anti-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB more regulated, and AirBnB and pro-AirBnB folks want to see AirBnB less regulated.

Then there's people who just want existing regulations to be enforced in their current scope.

Which, BTW, isn't an "anti"-AirBnB position at all.

>existing regulations to be enforced in their current scope

Which is an increase in regulatory action from the status quo, aka "more regulation". There's no actual distinction between the two except spin.

Which is an increase in regulatory action from the status quo, aka "more regulation"

No -- "more regulation" means either added statutes or a broadened interpretation of existing statutes.

To claim that having existing statutes to continue to be enforced -- i.e. to maintain the status quo -- when there's an uptake in violations against those statutes means that one is somehow advocating for "more regulation" is just... weird.

The status quo is largely-absent enforcement. It would be weird to use the term "more" if it was fully enforced right now, but it's not.

The status quo is largely-absent enforcement.

Aside from the fact that you have no data or sources to support this contention (it's just hunch you have), your logic is incredibly convoluted here.

Just about every article talks about how hosts are violating the law on a massive scale.

Making them stop is "more regulation", it's pretty simple logic. It doesn't matter which branch of government is doing it.

Making them stop is "more regulation", it's pretty simple logic.

But broken logic. And pretty much a repeat of where were at 6-8 levels up from here.

I guess we have completely different definitions of "regulation" then. I include statues and actions, you only count statutes. It's okay if you disagree, but my logic is not at all convoluted.

Well, yeah -- statutes and interpretations. Which I think is basically how most people would interpret (and assess the quantity of a given degree of) "regulation."

I think it's because it suggests that professional landlords / developers are using the platform to sidestep rent control laws, as opposed to regular people just renting out their homes while they are away on vacation.

To expand on this somewhat, Airbnb likes to pretend their business is about the unregulated and largely legal practice of people renting out an extra room, or perhaps every once in a while their whole vacant home for a short period of time when they happen not to be home. What everyone suspects but struggles to prove without access to the data is that most of their business is people renting out apartments they don't live in but instead rent out full time. This potentially runs afoul of many laws, in some cities rent control rules may be the main issue, in others they may be considered an unlicensed hotel which could violate tax or zoning laws.

And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.

Zoning laws are not simply about taxes. What if your neighbor decided to open a nightclub out of his garage one day, would it be okay as long as they paid taxes? The externalities imposed have to be accounted for.

Nor is it only about zoning laws. A nightclub, or under-the-table hotel, will likely be subject to laws like the ADA, additional fire codes, health inspections, and more. These are tangential to paying taxes.

There is issues of locals being 'displaced' in places like NYC because it often is more profitable for landlords to rent on Airbnb rather than rent traditionally. The real big deal is tenants have lots of rights whereas transients do not, so it creates even more incentives to ditch the locals in favor of Airbnb guests.

Then you can argue "why shouldn't NYC turn into a city of transients?" Which is probably more of a personal opinion if that is "wrong" or not.

To the GP:

The other thing to mention is in the US housing regulations are incredibly local so you're going to find a huge difference in different cities in how regulated rentals are. You will read online mostly about NYC of SF which have their unique problems.

So what?

Let the strongest do as they please - very democratic, indeed.

Just because you could tax them and the city might profit doesn't automatically invalidate the reasoning behind the current rules banning practices like this in the first place.

Maybe the reasoning is flawed. OK - then prove it, lobby for a change, but not just do as you wish and ignore the current laws because they are in the way of your business model.

This kind of disruptive thinking is a slippery slope imho. And I could argue lot's of evil with this line of thought.

I'm at a point where I've given up arguing, and maybe hoping, too. If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Now as more and more democracy is eaten by monetary power I feel only what's left to do is to wait for the big shock.. It's sad to think that even when people dedicate their time pro-bono to building tools and information medium like this, at most what it does is moderate temporarilly the recklessness of one group at the expense of very limited resources of others(like the free-time, dedication, small-money that people make available for this kind of stuff) but while there's money to make in subverting it there'll always be incentive to push the way through and put much more money, time and resources into doing it, if someone call you out you can just tone it down a bit and start over another day, seems like there's no winning. I'm brasilian and understand the the judiciary of USA is stronger and faster than in other country, but even then still this logic prevails, for elsewhere and where I'm at.. eh, dreadful.

> If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

That's simply a truism, tautology, it's true by definition of the words used.

The implication is that people are illegally listing multiple properties that they own or rent, but this analysis doesn't rule out the cases where someone hires a professional property manager to list their place on AirBnB while they're on vacation or away. That property manager will have multiple "whole home" listings but there's nothing illegal about it.

But we shouldn't expect an unbiased analysis from a site like insideairbnb.com, which is a partisan anti-airbnb advocacy project.

A huge number of rental tenants in NYC are not legally able to sublet. Hiring someone else to do it does not absolve them.

Even if your lease allowed you to sublet, the short term whole apartment rentals when the owner is not present that Airbnb does are illegal in NY anyway. The only way to do that legally is to have a bed and breakfast license from the state. Next time you look for an Airbnb in NYC, see if that's mentioned in the listing.

My building in a popular area of NYC does not allow sublet, and specifically calls out AirBnB as well. Given that, I would estimate 15-20% of the units in the building are now full-time AirBnB rentals. The suspicion I've had in the back of my head, that AirBnB "businesses" are driving up rents, is gaining momentum.

This report would seem more damning if the authors had at least attempted to keep their bias out of it. I found it significantly less credible because of it. I kept wondering what info they weren't sharing in their rush to paint Airbnb as liars and cheats. Or if their own data, which has no external validation either, is true.

Someone also made a good point here regarding Airbnb's motives. It is entirely feasible that Airbnb did a cleanup of bad/illegal listings before submitting data for government scrutiny.

I mostly agree. A site called insideairbnb.com that is clearly not affiliated with the company looks to be simply a muckraker blog about AirBnB.

But, the data does not lie. If they purged somewhere around half of all Full Home listings to make their export look like there were very few landlords that listed multiple properties, then they are manipulating data. One does not "clean up" data to be submitted to the government without providing an explanation for that purge.

If they cared they would have done it long ago. They chose to make money off those listings instead

To be fair, the fact that this was a New York City only thing could relate to NYC's particular subletting issues and housing laws.

To be fair, any company intentionally changing it's database before a public "snapshot" in order to gain public favor (and avoid possible litigation) is worth calling out as dishonest. So it's not really about NYC, it's about Airbnb.

That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

The source title was good: "How Airbnb's Data hid the Facts in New York City". This is a damning article for AirBnB and they need to respond. Let's not try to hide it.

The article was at #2 on the front page when I went to sleep last night, i.e. far from hidden, and we didn't penalize it. (HN has a longstanding policy of penalizing stories less, not more, when they say something negative about YC or YC companies. That's the first thing PG brought up when he taught me how to moderate the site.)

That doesn't mean we turn off moderation altogether, though. Many commenters were pointing out that the article's claims about wrongdoing exceeded the evidence it presented. In such cases it's normal HN practice to replace a tendentious title with a more neutral and accurate one, preferably using representative language from the article. We do this routinely.

A good title on HN is accurate and neutral. A bad title is misleading or linkbait. In my view the article's title was linkbait (making a juicy claim of wrongdoing and a reference to "The Facts" as if there is one set of Facts and they know what it is). If people feel strongly about this I'm happy to change it back, but this title replacement is so standard and the current title so much more factual that it would clearly be a breach of normal practice to do so.

"AirBnB caught facilitating wide scale illegal activity"?

That seems to suffer from the same problem as the original title.

Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466

That's not the policy.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20misleading%20or%...

> We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original title is egregious linkbait, or false.

hmm, the company who break thru by deceptive practice of craiglist's advertising of apartments to rent that never existed in the first place (but redirected to their website), with the owner who has been on top most wanted FBI list for being a top spammer in the USA... gee this news is really shocking!

I mean.. how could they??

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