Certainly there are still some people who are wealthy enough to keep their vacation homes vacant most of the time (and prefer it that way, since doing short-term rentals tends to involve quite a bit of wear-and-tear on a house and its furnishings). But many list on Airbnb now. I consider this a net positive for society.
Of course, Airbnb isn't all roses. In many places, investors buy up housing stock that would otherwise be used for long-term rentals, and deprive locals of much-needed stable housing. My guess would be that this is even -- unfortunately -- the primary use of Airbnb these days (I doubt they are primarily people renting out a room in their already-occupied house anymore). So this does suck.
On the renter side, I've found a lot of great places to stay through Airbnb over the years, experiences hotels just can't provide, and often prices hotels can't match. Should I just not be allowed to have these sorts of experiences? (It's totally fair if the answer to that is "yes", as much as it'd be disappointing.)
Can we find some sort of balance so that we can curb most of the negatives that come with real-estate investing, but keep most of the positives?
[0] Yes, vacation rental companies existed before Airbnb, but Airbnb completely changed this space.
why? Do you think the average person is renting out vacation homes for extended stays?
Yes, having cool places to stay is fun but there are better ways to accomplish that then rich people renting out their 2-nth homes.
Why do the stays have to be extended? I consider simply making more nice real estate in desirable locations accessible to more people a good thing. Doesn't matter if it's for a long weekend or several months.
> Yes, having cool places to stay is fun but there are better ways to accomplish that then rich people renting out their 2-nth homes.
Such as? Hotels are the primary existing option, and they're fine, but not always what I'm looking for (especially if I want to cook; hotel rooms with full kitchens are rare and expensive). Hostels are meh; I'm not a broke college student anymore. Actual bed and breakfasts are nice, but aren't for everyone. If I want to stay in something that feels like an actual home for a short duration, is there a better way than something like Airbnb?
To be clear, I agree with the top-level poster's bit about us not needing people hoarding homes just so they can rent them out as Airbnbs. That's exclusionary, (literally) rent-seeking behavior. But is there no middle ground where people like that don't get to satisfy their greed, but we still get to have nice things?
You are missing a critical issue. Airbnb makes it way more affordable to have this second home, so now many more only-sorta-wealthy people can afford vacation homes while pricing people out of the local housing market.
While this phenomenon is bad for people looking for long-term primary homes, it is nice to be able to afford a vacation home when you couldn't before. Certainly I would prioritize locals over non-locals looking for a second home, but can't we have both? Build more.
The market doesn't care whether someone is buying a vacation home or buying the only home that lets them stay in the region. It is the responsibility of the state to put its thumb on the scale in favor of positive externalities that the market is agnostic between.
How is it that the high-IQ HN zeitgeist centers on the contradictory positions of "climate change is an existential threat" and "we must expend more resources and build more housing"?
Seems like reducing population in high-carbon-footprint countries is the obvious solution to both problems.
What am I missing, here?
A little bit of Googling around seems to indicate that there are ~95,000,000 single family homes in the US. So all of those AirBnB's represent less than 1% of all homes. If all of those AirBnB's were in a given year they may have an impact on purchase prices. Yet these purchases have been spread out over many years which leads me to believe their impact is negligible as a driving force in price appreciation. Are they a player, sure, are they a big player.....probably not nearly as much as people think.
And I agree with you that number is much lower than I would have expected, and doesn't seem like enough to meaningfully move housing prices overall. Also consider that some number of those listings are people renting out a spare room in their owner-occupied property, which I don't think is fair to count "against" Airbnb; not sure what that number is, though.
It would be interesting to also see more local numbers. Like what percent of units in each of SF, NYC, downtown LA, Chicago, DC, etc. are listed on Airbnb? There are a lot of housing units in small towns and cities across the US that don't have much tourist appeal, so they likely don't see many Airbnb listings. But they also likely don't have housing-cost issues like some cities that are more attractive to tourists.
I think people try to invent complicated reasons for skyrocketing home prices, when it's fairly simple: we aren't building enough in the places where people want to live. Sure, other things (Airbnb, foreign investment[0], cheap credit, etc.) don't help matters, but I think they're pretty minor factors. If there's demand, and you don't meet it, prices go up. Econ 101.
It's interesting to note that Vancouver and Toronto instituted 20% and 15% (respectively) foreign buyer taxes for home purchases a bunch of years ago. These taxes did actually do their job of deterring foreign buyers, but, sadly, home prices still continued to go up, undeterred. And now Canada overall has barred foreign buyers for two years. I doubt it will help. I expect Airbnb bans would have a similar non-effect.
The median age of a home in the US is 37 years, which means 50% of homes were built before 1985. Compare building codes from before 1985 and 2022 and it's a huge difference. Now housing codes are there for our safety, but we also need to recognize that it makes homes much more expensive and complex all while 50% of people are living in homes built under "less safe" code standards and are just fine.
I myself live in a home built in 1967. It's a lovely home and just as livable as a home built today. Only a few select projects were needed to improve safety in places that mattered like replacing the electrical panel and some modifications to my deck.
When going through insurance pricing in the case of catastrophe (fire/earthquake/landslide) with my insurer, they estimated that the cost to rebuild my home today to modern standards is equal to our purchase price for the home and the land, which is crazy and gets even crazier when you consider that the cost of the land is about 2/3 of the value of my property.
Furthermore, the more labor and complexity that goes into building a home, the more homebuilders focus on upscale homes instead of mass market homes because of opportunity cost, especially when the permitting process is also so onerous. The only cheaply built housing options these days are apartments and condos. 40+ years ago we were building full single family homes for the cost of building an apartment today. That's insane.
The site hostsorter.com uses a citation from muchneeded.com[2].
When looking at the muchneeded.com link I see: "11. There are 660,000 listings in the United States."
However he citation for the above statistic is a site called pulse.ng[3].
When I get to the pulse.ng site I finally see the root source of the 660K figure you quoted. I also see that not only is the article from 5 years ago(2017) but there is no citation given at all for the statistic that is regurgitated from the previously 3 links.
[1] https://hostsorter.com/airbnb-statistics/
[2] https://muchneeded.com/Airbnb-statistics/
[3] https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/tech-airbnb-now-has-more-listin...
I prefer having discussion about the underlying issues causing these emotions though, they keep being mentioned here all the time but I guess its easier to just bash the messenger rather than fight government and selfishness/greed in general population.
And this "blame the government" for the the housing shortage is the same old tired trope that's invariably wheeled out when defending Airbnb. The "discussion" never seems have any more depth once that blame is assigned though. The fact is people have fought at the local government level, from Miami, to Berlin to NYC to London. It turns out that legislation itself isn't enough as it is regularly flouted or just plain ignored. Actually enforcing the legislation is difficult. And regular citizens and local governments are simply no match against the mega-Corp. Or is there another pithy and overly reductionist talking point to that complex problem as well?
Of course, the housing crisis is death by a thousand different cuts, but there are studies out there indicating in many cities AirBnB is responsible for around ~5% of the rental price.
For my apartment, that translates to paying ~$180/mo because of the induced demand from AirBnB.
I would love to see investors get burned too, but I don't think there's anything to pop. We're just a decade behind Canada.
That's not healthy
The other side is that anyone who sells right now will need to buy at the top of the market, possibly incur the 5%+ interests rates(if they didn't make out extremely well) and afford the increase in taxes on their new home's possibly insane property valuation. This is of course in addition to all the other current inflationary concerns of maintaining a house right now.
Rents have outpaced mortgage costs and the return on investment has been ridiculous. People all over here have jumped into it. Hell, I've had people tell me I should do it... No F'in way I'm dealing with tenants and house calls in the middle of the night, though. I fix my own house, poorly and struggle to do that. I fix computers and call people to fix the house, usually, so it gets done right. I venture out of my lane every once and again, but I know I'll usually call a professional =)
If you made a good enough offer you could buy it from them. Investors aren't trying to hoard. They want to make a return on their investment.
"Return on investment" shouldn't be more important than housing people affordably.
Are homes for living in, or for making money? That's the fundamental question we need to resolve. Because if its the former, then we are doing an abysmal job at satisfying that need. If its the latter, then we're doing a bang up job.
Even if you can only live in one at a time, you may want to temporarily live somewhere else. What if you feel like going to the beach for a weekend?