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Comment by chrisdannen | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. This restraining order was the first I had heard from my landlord that he didn't want us airbnb'ing. A phone call and I would have stopped. I knew it was too good to be true.

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Attached to the order was a complete printout of my Airbnb listing and all my reviews, included as evidence I had violated clauses in my lease. (Some leases, I have since learned, have evolved specific language prohibiting tenants from listing their pads on vacation-rental sites such as Airbnb.)

I don't buy your innocence here. I've been leasing houses for ~10 years now during and after college. The leases have always required a mix of landlord approval for subletting, banned running a business from the house, and prohibited occupation by non-lessees.

Here are two clauses from an older lease[1] I happen to have in my desk:

* Tenant shall not assign this Agreement, or sub-let or grant any license to use the Premises or any part thereof without prior written consent of Landlord.

* The premises shall be used and occupied by Tenant and Tenant's immediate family... exclusively, as a private single family dwelling.

Your faux innocence is pretty annoying actually. You were abusing the property for commercial purposes and you're surprised he didn't give you a friendly phone call?

1 Looks like the lease was originally snatched from www.academichomes.com/downloads/ExampleLeaseAgreement2.doc

I actually find your belligerent attitude annoying. Is that helpful to note?

OP would be 'abusing' the property if he were running a crack den. I see no problem with tenants doing whatever they want with the property that they are leasing - as long as no damage is done & neighbors are not troubled.

Then don't get doe-eyed when served with legal papers after signing a lease which explicitly prohibits the behavior.

> I see no problem with tenants doing whatever they want with the property that they are leasing - as long as no damage is done & neighbors are not troubled.

That's why landlords define "damage [being] done" and "neighbors [being] troubled" in a legally binding contract called a lease, and when you break that contract, you can get evicted.

I strongly suspect most resistance to these basic facts in this thread is typical Airbnb/pg/HN apologia. It certainly isn't coming from anyone who has rented in NYC, that's for sure.

I don't buy your innocence here.

I don't find it that hard to believe that someone would blindly sign a lease after only quickly skimming over the important bits and then never look at it again. I remember one landlord looking quite surprised when I sat in his office and read all 8 pages of the contract, asked for clarifications on a couple of points and asked for one clause to be changed. It seemed to me that she'd never seen anybody do that before.

As a landlord my lease agreement is only 3 pages, and I have always reviewed it with tenants before I allow them to sign it. I review every clause with them and have them initial every page. If they have questions or objections we sometimes modify clauses; we cross out the standard language and write in the new agreement and we both initial the change. It only takes a few extra minutes to review the entire agreement, and I wouldn't want a tenant to sign something that I know they haven't read.

My current landlord in Chelsea walked me through the exact same process. Took 10 minutes.

When said person is occasionally and randomly having friends or guests over, sure.

When said person is making a fulltime income solely from renting space in an apartment that he is only leasing, well, "most people" would think "I should probably take a look at my lease first"...

I think it's pretty much de facto standard that you must disclose first hand before you sign the lease contract whether you rent the place for living or for business. Subletting is not always forbidden but you have inform the landlord before you subleasing.

> I don't find it that hard to believe that someone would blindly sign a lease after only quickly skimming over the important bits and then never look at it again.

I don't find that hard to believe either.

What I find revolting is someone not reading the lease, violating it, then playing the victim.

The clauses in your lease which expressly forbid this sort of activity would actually probably count as the "first you heard from your landlord that he didn't want you AirBNB'ing." It's not like you were unaware of them - you wrote that you "had flouted the same clauses" before.

Now that you were cranking tons of guests through for personal gain, you were surprised when your landlord took exception. If I found out that somebody was blatantly disregarding the rental agreement they'd signed with me for commercial gain, they would not be getting a friendly "hey brother, can you please stop?" phone call either.

> This restraining order was the first I had heard from my landlord that he didn't want us airbnb'ing.

Read leases before you sign them in the future.

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