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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

This pandemic is really shining light on many flimsy and questionable business models. In good times, it looks great on paper to own a business with no inventory and whose sole purpose is to be a marketing middleman between people offering a service and those in need of a service.

But in bad times, income dries up—in this case, extremely quickly—and the flaws of that business model are exposed.

Airbnb, coworking spaces, Getaround, and home services companies are just a few examples of this model. Bird/Lime also have this issue and will likely collapse as well—both have laid off most or all of their staff (Bird in particular handled it poorly.)

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Isn't it actually better for them not to have the liabilities of cars, hotel rooms etc on their books? They can lean up and cut costs and spring right back up once the pandemic is under control. At least theoretically.

Exactly. Actual car rental companies are down more than 60% because they have debt payments to make whether people want to rent the cars or not.

AirBnB etc have (relatively) fixed infrastructure and staffing costs.

Companies can negotiate loan payment holiday if they can persuade their creditors that it makes more sense to get an extra few months of debt relief than to be closed down - which would probably take a few months anyway.

Not so with fixed staffing costs. Even if furlough is an option you need to decide who's essential, and who can be layed off temporarily - not always simple, especially if you're not sure if the downturn will be short.

If furlough isn't an option you suddenly start burning your cash reserves after a huge drop in income, and investors start getting very nervous.

> Companies can negotiate loan payment holiday

By the time bond holders are taking a haircut, shareholders are wiped out.

> Not so with fixed staffing costs.

Layoffs aren't easy, but owners have more flexibility and control than they do negotiating with bond holders.

I don't follow this logic.

Bird/lime own their inventory.

Airbnb is better off than the hotel chains IMO. The hotel chains have to keep paying their staff and rent while revenue drops, but airbnb just sees the revenue drop.

It exposes the people who bought properties to list on airbnb on aggressive margins or like the example in the article of someone buying a car just to put on the platform. I wonder how much rental prices will be affected when the properties that were bought to use for airbnb are brought back to the long-term rental market.

Yes, Airbnb will be better off because they've offloaded all the risk on the hosts -- which is really what we're talking about here. Sure there were some hosts just renting out their basement suite but many others were effectively running makeshift hotels by buying up properties. Those people are going to be in big trouble.

Actually, I know some people who bought whole homes in vacation destinations that are doing fine as they are advertising their properties as good places to quarantine. It's the market for shared spaces that is completely dead.

That's got to be the exception rather than rule.

I'm under quarantine at an Airbnb!

I agree with you about Airbnb. Airbnb itself will be fine, but those who bought a property to rent out are hurting.

But Bird/Lime are in deep trouble, and not just because of cost of the scooters they own. Who is going to rent one, not knowing the health status of the previous renter?

I don't follow your logic. AirBnB will be fine even though nobody wants to use their service, but Bird/Lime won't be fine because nobody wants to use their service?

I'd be much more comfortable using a scooter because I can just wipe down the handles. I have no idea what's going on in someone else's house, and in my experience AirBnB hosts are pretty shitty about cleaning up their properties even though they make you pay for it.

No, Airbnb will be fine because their expenses are running the servers, not owning the houses. They won't be making money, but they won't be losing it, either. The people who bought a house to rent via Airbnb, on the other hand, are going to get crushed.

Sure, you can wipe down the handles, if you brought wipes with you. That makes it a lot more spontaneous to use, though (unless you carry wipes everywhere, which is in fact a reasonable thing to do).

AirBnB, to the best of my knowledge, has never been actually profitable even when business was booming. The notion that they will suddenly be okay now that they're not making money is ridiculous, even if they have fewer costs than hotels.

I understand your point about hosts bearing the brunt of the costs, but that's comparing AirBnB the business to AirBnB the users. I was comparing AirBnB the business to Bird/Lime the business, because that was a juxtaposition you made in your original comment.

Anyway, agree to disagree I guess.

A pile of unused scooters is probably not that expensive either to store somewhere while they're not used (and many are probably just out on the street). Aren't employee costs going to hurt both models more? Bird already laid of hundreds of their 1,000+ employees. Airbnb has 12,000+ employees.

The scooter companies might have less reserves though, and their market is probably oversaturated even in good times.

AirBnB will be worse off, because post COVID19, people will trust hotels more than random strangers' houses. You know the hotel will be cleaned. You can't say the same of an AirBnB.

And it's very likely that AirBnB restrictions will increase post-COVID19 to eliminate a lot of the apartment units that were (illegally) converted to AirBnB units, and that enforcement of existing AirBnB restrictions in cities like NY and LA will increase dramatically, both for safety reasons and to protect the hotel companies that actually employ workers, pay hotel taxes, and contribute to the local economy.

I can't speak for every city, but where I live, a lot of Airbnber's are hurting for the sudden drop in revenue. Hotels might get bailouts or credits from the government but short term rental companies will get nothing and be hard pressed to find the resources to continue paying their mortgages. We're already seeing condos that were rented out as Airbnb's pop up on the real estate market.

That is a good thing. Those condos should never have been converted to unregistered hotel rooms, and I'm sure the other people living in those developments will be glad that the parade of strangers will no longer be invading their buildings.

This is also the perfect time for jurisdictions to tighten up their regulations that pertain to Airbnb.

Meh. If hotels can have bed bugs, they have Coronavirus, too.

Coronavirus was the impetus for pricking the bubble. As Warren Buffet so eloquently put it: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.”

Turns out there were a lot of unsustainable businesses like this. The Fed and government stimulus will not be able to reflate that bubble. No matter how many companies we nationalize.

I think it's important to separate "the bubble" pricking from the very arbitrary nature of which industries are affected by coronavirus. I mean, for travel, restaurants, gyms, non-emergency healthcare etc. it's a great depression, while for distance learning, Amazon, videoconferencing, gaming, etc. it's boom times. But it's not like travel, restaurants etc. are inherently bad businesses.

Is Amazon booming? In Canada, some Amazon shipments for non essential equipment is going to take over a month which is why I'm not bothering to order anything from them during this time and finding other stuff locally.

That's because their customers are going bananas and buying everything. Amazon is trying to hire like crazy. https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/amazon-seeks-hire-100000...

All the "sharing economy" businesses like Airbnb and "Airbnb but for x" (like this one with x = cars) have the same model anyway, be the middle-man, promise protection for both sides, take 30%, great if everything works out, but be slow to respond and offer a pittance if one of the parties gets shafted.

I don't think that follows.

What's hurting e.g. Airbnb is not that they are a marketing middleman between people offering a service and people in need of a service. It's that the need for that underlying service has greatly diminished--if people don't need the underlying service anymore then they don't need a marketing middleman for that service either.

What you need to make your point are examples where the underlying service still does fine in bad times, but the marketing middleman for that service do not.

According to your logic all of the restaurants, hotels and bars have a questionable business model since they are suffering now because of the pandemic

I specifically stated “a business with no inventory and whose sole purpose is to be a marketing middleman between people offering a service and those in need of a service.” Restaurants, hotels, and bars provide services directly and are not examples of this.

Those businesses work perfectly well -- see banks, retail stores (who often don't even own the inventory they're selling), Amazon. The ones that don't work are the ones whose markets are affected by natural disaster, which is true of any business.

I think that industry statistics show that many restaurants always have questionable business models.

It would certainly be ideal if Restaurants, Cruise Lines, Hotels, Airlines had the balance sheets to handle an event like this, so far a 2 month slowdown, especially as there are things like cancelled events, hurricane season, recessions reducing travel, etc.

"questionable business model => may collapse during a pandemic" is not equivalent to "may collapse during a pandemic => questionable business model".

(No comment on whether these things have a questionable business model, this is just how implication works.)

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