Hacker News Reader

Comment by camus | Hacker News Reader

To all the people that think Airbnb is great , why should landlords have tenants so tenants can sublet ?

landlords will end up posting offers on Airbnb directly ,that's what will happen "en masse" in the future.

And You'll need to pay the Airbnb premium to rent anything.

After all , if i'm a landlord and ask for 2000$ a month for normal tenants , i can just go on Airbnb and ask for 200 or more an night , so i only need to rent it for 10 days a month for it to be profitable...

Landlords arent stupid we'll eventually end up in that situation on a large scale.

View on HN

I'm not sure why this isn't the top comment on any of these threads. The only place that I know of that gives tenants an absolute right to sublet is Chicago (https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/dcd/gen... see:SUBLEASES) Where this right doesn't exist, the standard tenant agreement will come to always contain a no AirBnB clause.

AirBnB will be a thing that landlords do. Property management companies are against it because it automates them out of existence. For landlords, it will be an unprecedented boon. Eventually people will be bragging about buying a 1 year lease on property like they once bragged about buying property.

This terrifies me, because I think that it will be a fairly irreversible phase change that solves the massive vacancy rate problem that we've had since the property bubble inflated. It's like German work sharing applied to housing (the vacancy rate will be spread more evenly across rental properties over time.)

Why does it terrify you?

Because rents will double.

Clearly you do not rent property. Renting on AirBnB is more complicated, expensinve, hard then your typical month to month. First of all you have to clean up between guest, re-stock soap, toilet paper, napkins,... You have to furnish the place, pay all utilities including Wifi and probably cable. I have gotten calls at 10pm because a renter could not figure out how to change input on the TV from DVD player to cable. Regular landlords don't want to deal with these types of issues and probably couldn't with out a customer support staff.

It seems you have copyright infringement liability as well, when the guest pirates a movie using your equipment. Or worse problems, when the guest makes threats using your equipment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com