Hundreds of Toronto hosts delisted

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I actually read about some Toronto hosts getting their listings suspended a year ago, because their was some minor discrepancy between the address on the city license and their address with Airbnb, but those were individual cases, not a big sweep.

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Glad to see airbnb delisting folks that are ‘illegal’. Not so glad to see that some of the ‘illegal’ issues are clerical errors.

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Yeah, the hosts I read about this happening to starting about a year ago were legit hosts with all the proper licensing. Then one day they found themselves suspended, and it took them a long time to get to the bottom of it. Not clerical “errors”, per se, just silly discrepancies like the license being issued to XX Street, and their registered Airbnb address being written as XX St.- things that no one would ever guess would matter unless you were specifically told it had to match exactly to the letter. At that time, it seemed that when they called the city, they were told their license was valid, no problem, when they called Airbnb, they were told to contact the city. It was a big frustating run-around.

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If a human being flagged this in an audit, that’s outrageous. If an algorithm did it, it was poorly written. Many online credit card transactions verify the “account address” for the card, and the code that underlies the address check is written with routines that recognize that St = Street, I’m wondering if the City of Toronto wants to convert these units back into the long-term-rental market (otherwise known as “housing”) and is just using any old excuse.

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I have no idea whether a human or an algorithm was responsible, but the hosts who had legit licenses and were not trying to violate any local str restrictions were reinstated once they got to the bottom of it and changed the addresses, etc., to completely match.

So I don’t think it was a matter of the city trying to shut down everyone even if they were complying with local restrictions, just some absurd bureaucratic nonsense. Of course that doesn’t mean they don’t want to shut down illegal listings- they do, but not simply by identifying that it says “Ave.” instead of “Avenue”.

Bureaucrats can come up with some really senseless rules. In Mexico, some female expats who wanted to apply for citizenship were stymied because Mexico requires the name on your birth certificate to exactly match the name on your passport, so women who took their husband’s last name when they married were turned down. It didn’t even matter if they provided their marriage license and official name change. They had to get a new passport in their maiden name if they wanted to proceed.

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I knew of a host once who had a different address for the airbnb than what was their actual addresss. They got Airbnb to put the pin in a different place on the map (this was long ago, I think I read that we can control that ourselves now?)

I won’t swear to it but I had the impression that the whole purpose was to evade regulation. Then when guests would book they had to be meticulous with the guests about following her directions and not directions provided by Airbnb.

It’s these kinds of situations they are trying to crack down on; it’s a shame there were also some errors.

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Yes, I’ve read of areas which are heavily regulated having scammer listings like this a lot. Hollywood was one of them, as I recall. The address on the booking and map is entirely different from the actual listing address. They supposedly have a key pick-up at the address given on Airbnb, but then tell the guest the listing is elsewhere, but if it’s inconvenient for you to pick up the key, we can arrange a different check-in procedure.

A host in the LA area, who abides by the regulations, alerted people to this on another forum, and a host who is also a guest said she booked a place where this happened. When the scammer host gave her some BS story about why the address was different, she reported it to Airbnb and had them cancel the booking.

Not only are these hosts trying to skirt regs, guests end up booking, only to find out the actual location is miles away from where they wanted or needed to stay.

The legit, properly licensed hosts in Toronto this happened to didn’t have the listing pin in the wrong place, or a different address, it was just that some word was abbreviated on the license, but not on Airbnb, or vice-versa, or maybe one spelled out their middle name and the other just had a middle initial.

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I hope to see this whole, women are property to be exchanged thing die off in my lifetime. My girls have good role models, who never changed their names. Yet their school teachers are always doing it. Nothing like having a couple of daughters to turn one into a feminist!

RR

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I was named after my father, who was an _________, so I changed my first name as an adult. I would have kept my married last name since none of the men in that family were _________________s. But it didn’t seem like mine to keep so I reverted to my maiden name. I wish I’d thought to change my last name to something of my choice too but had no idea about what name I would have chosen. I’ll be dead before it’s common for children to have all kinds of combos of names. But for many generations there will be some vestige of a man’s name there somewhere.

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I changed my last name officially many decades ago, as my maiden name (my father’s last name) was one people always had to ask how to spell, and though I had taken my husband’s last name when we married, when we separated a year and a half later, way back in the 70s, I really wanted to forget him, and also his last name was one people always had to ask how to spell. So I just came up with a new last name.

My two younger daughters have my last name, my oldest had my husband’s last name, but took her own husband’s last name when they married. I never asked her why she chose to do that. Probably because she thought her dad, who she had very little contact with, was just as much of a jerk as I did.

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I mentioned keeping my maiden name to my future husband. He was understandably confused by any desire on my part to keep my dad’s name. Since his name was associated with a well known and honorable family it wasn’t hard to convince me. It’s one of those things I missed my opportunity to do when I did the divorce related name change. But I least I got it half right.

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I’ve always kept my maiden name. One reason is that although my last name is one of the most common, I think it’s cool in conjunction with my first name.

My second husband changed his last name to mine. Which was fine until we got divorced because there was a record of XX and YY getting married but it was XX and YX who were divorced when conventionally it should have been XY and YY.

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Well now I want to speculate…

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