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Comment by hodder | Hacker News Reader

Very weak evidence presented in the article. Airbnb is surely a factor in rental price increases, but if it were in fact a leading causative factor, how come municipalities that ban airbnb do not see rental prices drop materially?

The focus clearly needs to be put on adding substantial supply, and in Canada at least, reigning in the demand from new immigration.

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Part of the issue is that being a landlord for short-term tenants is very different than being a landlord for long-term tenants. There's a misconception that "well, if we ban STRs, then they'll have to rent long-term. Checkmate." In many municipalities that have banned short-term rentals (particularly vacation destinations with many second homes), many landlords would just say "okay, I'm not renting at all then."

for real. small time landlording is a drag, living under damocles' sword, one bad tenant or calamity away from getting months of your life ruined. small time airbnb renting is just gravy in comparison.

Well, they don't _have_ to rent long-term but if the unit is kept unoccupied, then they will be hit with the Empty Homes Tax in Vancouver, for instance. So yeah, they are forcing the landlords hand here.

And yes, I agree the house problem is a supply-vs-demand issue. And this is not addressing the core problem. But in a place with extremely low rent vacancy [2], having units removed from the market for STR isn't helping.

[1]: https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t... [2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rent-prices-rose-in-2023-1....

The empty homes tax is a joke. It's too easy to bypass (just have somebody you know use it as their primary address and add a few lamps on timers) and priced too low (in many cases the tax is cheaper than the costs of having long term tenants).

The way to reduce the number of airbnbs is to allow more hotels to be built and in better parts of the cities.

The idea that full-time airbnbs could ever complete with the brutal efficiency of the hotel industry is crazy, but again, the only reason why AirBnB exists is to capture the some of the real estate value created by the artificial real estate shortage.

> allow more hotels to be built

This won’t solve the problem because AirBnB is a fundamentally different lodging stock that meets different market demands. A traditional hotel cannot reasonably accommodate a group of friends / a few families that want to stay together, cook together, eat, and recreate in the same living space.

The most a hotel can usually offer is a sad suite with an efficiency kitchen. More often it’s connected rooms with Grandma and Grandpa three floors away and another Aunt and Uncle in the other tower of the hotel.

I mean, I both disagree, and reject the point regardless. The vast majority of instances of vacationers could be supplied by hotels if it were easy and legal to build multi-unit hotels. If there are use cases where Airbnb is superior, so be it but demand for Airbnb units would drop significantly if the vast majority of folks can stay in a hotel for a better price-to-product value.

Do rental prices ever drop ? I think they may increase slower but that's about it.

Certainly. If supply were to increase faster than demand, pricing would fall in real terms. This has happened many times in history in Canadian municipalities.

I am happy for you. On western continental Europe where I live I never saw that. Houses where highways are getting built see their selling prices drop though.

Of course they can drop, even in [insert your country here] but look worldwide for more extreme examples.

Also an increase below inflation/wages is a drop, particularly if sustained over a long period of time.

Rents in San Francisco are well below what they were in 2015-2019.

I wonder how rental market is and what it feels like elsewhere. Here it seems to move at a glacial pace. Mayors throw parties when a block of 4 appartements is built (never mind the destroyed 20 rentals in the process, killed the local shops for the 6 years completion took, but that's another problem).

Well in places in the middle of economic crisis and where people become poorer with decreased salaries and increased unemployment, it has happened actually, because the alternative would be the landlord to have to pay maintenance and taxes anyway. But probably not right now in the west.

We are slowly getting there in the country I live in: they are enacting laws to tax empty rentals and hiring people to check utilities usage and physically mapping empty floors from the street.

It's pretty rare to see prices go down. I think it's most likely when the market really lurches due to some economic shocks and there is a short term over supply of housing, but the market corrects pretty quickly.

What is more common in a healthy housing market with lots of vacancy is that prices continue to go up, but below inflation.

> how come municipalities that ban airbnb do not see rental prices drop materially?

When someone is looking to move to an area, they're looking to move to the area, not a specific municipality. If the municipality that banned AirBnB were isolated enough from other communities that did allow AirBnB you would likely see rents decrease as supply would meaningfully increase when the AirBnBs are banned. But in practice, the number of AirBnBs in the municipality that bans them relative to the number of houses in the same rental market area is small.

everyone wants to move there to get away from the party condos.

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