Hacker News Reader

Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com