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Now listen here. If you are a host then you expect people to behave in your property, right? Well, this might surprise you but it’s 2016 and a website, this website, can be seen in a similar way.
This website is someone’s property. Someone went to the trouble to create this site in order to host those of us who want to have discussions about the benefits and problems of being an Airbnb host. I suggest that you, as a guest here, have respect for that in just the same way that you’d expect guests on your property to respect that.
Sorry but you are 100% wrong. “Greedy Bankers” WERE following the law at that time and did NOT create the problem. Bankers are NOT the guy with bags of money you remember from Monopoly. Bankers now days are simply SALES people who’s JOB it is to sell loans, the higher the loan, the larger THEIR pay check. When you walk in to ANY 'banker" they are going to look at your income, credit, etc and see IF you fit in the box for an FHA Loan, a VA Loan, or a Conventional Loan than then give you the paperwork to apply for that loan type. Once the loan is closed and funded then WITHIN 45 days your “banker” sells the loan. EVERY loan is sold so instead of “banker” think used car sales man.
The REAL cause of the problem we had was NOT bankers, once the housing boom started, Barnie Franks got on the floor of Congress and cried about how the “poor” are not participating in The Great American Dream of home ownership, how the “poor” was getting Redlined for loans due to unstable credit and job history. So CONGRESS rewrote the rules for mortgage lending which ALLOWED bad loans to be sold and GUESS WHO bought EVERY loan ANY lender was able to sell? THAT allowed bankers to write bad loans. That allowed people to buy more than they should have. THE TRUE problem was Democrats in Congress wanted the poor to participate in the real estate boom and that is what drove up demand and drove up prices to TWICE the highest level ever seen in the USA.
I own my home, my HOA allows STR, and my county has NO LAW or regulations against STR. I am in full compliance in every way. I have a tax license for both general excise and transient accommodations. I collect and pay semi annually.
I report and pay federal income tax on my STR earnings.
Just how does that make me a hypocrite again?
Again, someone who probably sublets in violation of their lease is getting mad at me the messenger. No judgment in delivering the message, just facts.
@loady I’d be really interested in you linking to research which shows that 90% of BNB lets globally are in violation of a law or policy or rule. Could you link to the research report that shows this please?
I am sure you appreciate that the terms you are using only apply to properties in the US, which is just one country that offers BNB.
I have always owned my freehold homes outright so have always been legal. A bit much for you to make assumptions about those responding to this thread, who find the OPs approach rather unsavoury, with no basis in fact. So knock off with the judgemental assumptions
This is the most distorted and delusional analysis of the mortgage crisis that I’ve ever heard. I would love to show this to my class this week in our discussion of neoliberalism. Do you mind if I screen shot this for the class?
There are actually not SO many versions out there – there’s this one that attempts to blame the working-class for the near collapse of the global economy (if the working class only knew they had so much power, LOL!) But academics, Nobel prize-winning economists, and the most mainstream pro-business/finance circles (Forbes, Business Week, Washington Post) regard this as completely disingenuous. Here’s one of many mainstream articles that refer to this as “The Big Lie”…
Congress did participate by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998/1999, effectively ending regulations of banking and securities that had been in place for over half a century (since the 1930s, commercial banks have been separated from investment banks). Nothing bad will happen if you repeal this legislation, Wall St proponents and the finance sector cried! All these regulations just muck up the free-market! Don’t worry, we would never pursue profit in a manner that would cause systemic collapse! Honestly, in the 1990s, do you really think that Congress would pass legislation that advocated for property-ownership on behalf of the working class? Maybe that would have happened in the 1930s, but for the past 35 years, “trickle down” economics, cutting corporate taxes, and the expansion of global capitalism has been what the U.S. Congress has delivered, regardless of party affiliation.
Real Estate market is a Supply/Demand Market. When you write LAWS that ALLOW banks to write and sell loans to the government, (Freddie and Fannie) then banks WILL write and sell more loans and create more profit for THEM. When Freddie and Fannie buy EVERY loan written and you allow them to BUY loans with NO DOCUMENTATION of income or credit…then THAT IS EXACTLY what banks will write. When ANY person can get a loan you create UNLIMITED demand for property. When you have HIGH demand for property with limited supply; prices WILL go up! IF Freddie and Fannie refused to buy loans below a certain credit score or income level then the banks would NOT write those loans because they would not be able to resell them. THIS is exactly the predictable result of Congress repelling Glass/Steagail because it was done in an effort to ALLOW “the poor” to buy in to The Great American Dream of home ownership. GOVERNMENT relaxed the standards and THAT increased the supply of money for real estate markets. That increase supply is what drove up demand and prices. When the government tightened credit standards for loans then the demand for housing went down and you had too many people who were in loans THEY could not afford to hold because they were planning on selling to “the greater fool” after them in line but when that greater fool could not get a loan there was no one to sell the house to so the borrow walked away and the banks were forced to foreclose. Higher supply of homes with lower qualified buyers means lower prices.
THE BIGGEST mistake of this boom and bust cycle is the Federal Government forgetting to govern and instead BECOMING the single largest LENDER in the country by getting in to the PRIVATE business of mortgage lending. Instead of REGULATING the market; they BECAME the market for ALL loans. The government CREATED Freddie and Fannie to process ALL the mortgage loans THEY bought and resold.
BEFORE this banks WERE responsible for their loans and if they wrote a loan that went in to foreclosure, THEY took the loss. But with Fannie and Freddie, banks NO LONGER were at risk of “bad loans” because the government TOLD banks what to write, what to accept, and what they would buy as soon as the loan closed. ALL the risk was transferred to the government and banks profit were HUGE.
CDOs were the backend of this game where the government sold the loans they bought to Wall Street Firms who then packaged them and resold them again. But again THAT market was created to meet the demand of Freddie and Fannie .
The federal government has been insuring home mortgages since 1937. You know, that little FHA mortgage thing that financed over 34 million properties in the U.S.
True, they used to “insure” mortgages, but now they decided to BE the entire market where they dictate lending guidelines and PURCHASE as well as insure over 90% of all mortgage loans written.
Put another way: when Government no longer is just the referee but tries to manipulate economic outcomes (i.e.making home affordable to people that through normal market forces do not qualify) in essence it creates a false economy; a classic ‘Ponzi’ scheme if you will. This whole mess started in 1994. In time over 60% of all loans felled under Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The most dangerous aspect of this whole affair is not the loans itself, but the power that a Government amazes to indulge in the above exercise. Today, the US’s principal problem IMHO is the size and power of its Government. Go back the last 300 years (post 1688), the greatest thinkers have consistently warned against this danger.
Meantime back at the ‘ranch’, my guests begin to arrive again on Saturday and I for one will miss the carefree days of the last month, but the bank account will be once more quite happy.
Too big? Really? What size government do you think we should have to manage 318.9 million people? Are you talking about the Federal Government, State governments, municipal governments?
You are thinking in absolute terms, meaning if you have 300 millions people, it stands to reason you have to have a huge government. Did you forget about the power side, meaning the degree in which a government can manipulate and intrude into every aspect of people’s lives? That is what those great thinkers were talking about.
The Federal government in particular, the first culprit.
To be honest, I spend a lot of my time considering these questions, but I think [after having deleted a long post] that this isn’t the forum to discuss any of this. I understand what power at all levels of government can do. It can be a source of good, but it can also be used to suppress and regress. The Federal government is not an evil player in this field of social and monetary justice.
I see you have edited several times since I began… but your basic point remains unchanged.
I agree. It is a complex issue, perhaps not suited for this forum. BTW, I never suggested it is inherently evil, on the contrary, for oftentimes it tries to do good, just a citizenship should be very conscious of the size and power of its central government because it is so hard to get that power back.
They’re also not giving any details about how they come up with the number, or how they reached the agreement. Basically, the information they provide is of zero use if you want to apply it to a different listing site. This is true of India, at least. In a “normal” place, perhaps you could check with the appropriate govt people, but this is India, land of the nightmare bureaucracy.
