So glad that NY has made STRs in apartment buildings illegal - we just got 2 bookings because of it (we are close to the train that has an express stop to NYC) and our airbnb is in our home.
Hoping that the “Arbitrage” folks are the next to fall…
5 Likes
Nice. I hope we can reduce the competition so that we can charge more rates. Would be great to get as many hosts shut down as possible.
2 Likes
Ugh, my best friend is in NYC now and dealing with an ABB nightmare as a guest.
Background info: friend has a stellar (5* over a dozen stays) reputation on ABB and she’s super clean and quiet. (I know because she lived with me for a while after her divorce. Most of the time the only way you’d even know she’s at home is if her car was outside, or if she was cooking dinner for the family.) She’s an introvert and likes her alone time. After a couple years of saving, she has taken a 3 month vacation from her job in Sydney and has been traveling through the U.S. She booked a month-long stay in an apartment in Brooklyn so she could attend some art events in NYC (she’s an artist).
So she is staying at a place where she has her own room in an apartment shared with the host. There is a box window air conditioner in her room. She specifically chose this place because it had A/C and she was going to be there during the warmer months.
Then a heat wave hits and the host tells her she has to leave the bedroom door open at night so the A/C in friend’s room (which is the only one in the apartment) can cool the whole apartment. My friend tells the host she’s not comfortable leaving the door open. Host tells her she isn’t sufficiently social (!) and that no other previous guest has had a problem sleeping with the door open. Then she tells my friend that she’s going to remove the A/C from friend’s room and put it in her own room. WTF?
Friend calls ABB which confirms that the host can’t force her to keep her bedroom door open at night and also doesn’t have the right to remove the A/C from the room when it’s advertised as having A/C. (Also confirms that there’s no house rule saying guests must sleep with their door open.) (Even if she trusted this sketchy host, how does she know who the host might let into the house?)
So the host, pissed off that ABB is backing up the guest, cancels her stay and tells her she has to be gone that evening. Airbnb says they’ll refund her money for the days she hasn’t stayed there, and offers her 10% off a future stay, but meanwhile she’s stuck in NYC at the moment when ABBs are shutting down all over the city and there’s no place to stay so that 10% is completely irrelevant to her.
AAARGH – I’m so pissed on her behalf! For all that we hosts hear horror stories about ABB supporting dodgy guests, here’s a case where a dodgy host has completely screwed over a guest and ABB is not supporting her, not helping her find any alternative accommodation. She is scrambling to try to find a hotel room for tonight.
4 Likes
Wow. That’s terrible. I imagine all of the airbnb that have already been approved for STR, are already booked. I wish her luck & I hope she finds a great place to stay.
2 Likes
Yep, and hotels are booked solid as well! Thanks for your sympathy; I’ve been encouraging her to try Secaucus or somewhere in New Jersey along the train line. Hopefully she finds something.
The amazing thing is that she didn’t come away from this experience saying “I’ll never stay in Airbnb again” (that’s how I would feel!). Instead she said, “From now on I’ll only stay with superhosts!”
2 Likes
Good news, Airbnb just found my friend a hotel. Hopefully the cost will be charged to the host and they will block the host. It’s absolutely unbelievable that this host would have the gall to tell a guest to sleep with the bedroom door open, complain that she wasn’t socialising enough, and then cancel her stay. I cannot even imagine doing any of those things as a host. Hosts like that are what give Airbnb a bad name and hurt all of us who are working so hard to provide great stays to our guests.
But to the bigger picture of the NYC thing, it’s sure going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. NYC is hugely reliant on tourism and real estate costs are so high. Many people must be relying on their ABB income to be able to pay the rent and mortgage. This will reconfigure so much.
2 Likes
This is one of the best things that could happen to STR.
I hope more cities (or countries) will follow.
Either you are a real B&B or you get a commercial licence and have to act accordingly.
2 Likes
What is an apartment building? I saw we have an entire building that has been converted to Airbnb listings in our neighborhood. The building is like a hotel but all are Airbnbs.
It depends on it original designation.
If it was meant as a building where people would live long term, then it should be illegal.
If it used to be a hotel, and they made some big renovation and created small apartments out of multiple rooms, it should be no problem.
First case you are taking away homes, second case you were already STR, now you just changed to a different kind of STR.
The second happens a lot where I live, investors buy old hotels and convert them.
1 Like
That building was not a hotel, it was an apartment building people used to live there. Not sure how did all emptied. Maybe someone bought the entire building and is using it as Airbnbs.
Maybe Airbnb guests were bothersome and caused all the regular tenants to move.
1 Like