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> (I say this as a landlord). They feel they are entitled to take out a mortgage then collect checks without any work. It isn't that easy...

(I say this a as a tenant). How is that any different than taking out a lease and then collecting checks without any work or risk?

What does this even mean?

And the tenants do have quite a bit of risk here: a fine of $20k is certainly worth pursuing through the courts. So also significant property damage. They seem to be banking (and to be fair, so far it's a good bet) on landlords being too lazy.

Property ownership is public information that can be verified with the town.

Furthermore, I didn't see any reason to jump to such conclusions given in the article. These people seem like professional swindlers so they could have presented false documents when signing the lease.

Most false documents can generally be detected by reference checks, particularly if it includes a credit check. The landlords in the article did not sound like they'd bothered.

Property ownership is not trivial to check: not only does the registrar vary by location, with varying availabilities of information, but who is to say that person X asking airbnb to do / not do something is the X on the title? Further, lots of rental property is owned by a LLC/trust/corporation. Of course you can determine who is authorized to speak for the aforementioned LLC, but it's not an api request away.

Yes it is an API lookup to verify the LLC's authorized persons, for Florida: http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByName

These people sound like professional swindlers, you can buy someone's identity on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars at the most. They almost certainly filled out the rental application using someone else's information. That was implied in TFA.

Property ownership is very trivial to check. Calling city/town hall when a property is listed is not an unreasonable task for a multi-million dollar company, more like the bare minimum due diligence. If they can manage to send out professional photographers they can manage basic ownership verification.

You skipped entirely over trusts. Property managers are regularly not named members of an LLC. To wit, I'm a manager of an apartment building that I (quite unfortunately) don't have any ownership interest in. Building a state-by-state, or county-by-county lookup system; verifying person X is authorized to make decisions for a property; then detecting updates is decidedly non-trivial. You can skip googling since I already know the answer: there's very limited information available in many states on corporations. See eg Delaware. Other states don't require updates, or require updates only on very long periods. Many small LLCs simply skip even required annual updates. There's also complications such as the address used by the building and even the postal service is quite possibly not the recorded address. In 2015, [1] claims there were 550k property listings in the US alone. None of this can't be done, but trivial it isn't. I happen to know much of this because I used to work on address information.

[1] http://blog.airdna.co/2015-in-review-airbnb-data-for-the-usa...

> How far should airbnb be required to go to verify ownership, and what happens when ownership changes?

Isn't this a matter of public record? Tons of solutions for verifying identity exist and are used in other industries.