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I’m still deciding how I feel about this article. I think there are several valid points & some I think are too extreme.
In my beach area, rents & home prices have skyrocketed. STRs have increased dramatically. Investment groups are driving me crazy with cash offers to buy my condos.
Anyway-something to read
I’m sorry, but I gave up after:
I write to you today in the hope that you will radically re-structure your company before it starts a class war in which you will almost certainly lose the lion’s share of your wealth, your moral conscience, your place in history as innovators instead of oppressors, and you and your family’s physical safety.
FFS fella, it’s an online STR platform, not a satanic cult. Oh hang on a sec…
JF
I agree. His extremism diminishes the elements of his editorial that have value. In the crazy world we live in where drama & shouting is considered “presenting the news” sadly only extreme opinions get attention
While I agree with his basic premise, many of his suggestions don’t make any sense. He seems to think that Airbnbs are either owner-occupied or investment properties. He apparently doesn’t know that many home-owners have a rental unit on the property that they live on, that they created for the purpose of str, and that it wouldn’t be available for long-term housing anyway- the hosts haven’t taken anything off the market in terms of available homes to buy or rent for locals.
And the 14 days a year suggestion is absurd and clueless. I’m not going to ever rent out my guest room long-term, I’d rather it sit empty, available to friends and family who visit, and I don’t want a roommate. So even if I hosted guests 365 days a year, it has zero effect on a housing crisis.
I’m pretty left wing but I also found his rhetoric off putting. I’m still waiting for the evidence to come in that Airbnb is the problem. Absentee landlords, skyrocketing home prices, housing shortage, unaffordable housing, gentrification…those are all problems that Airbnb didn’t cause and I don’t think we know yet how much they make the problem worse.
And c’mon man, if we didn’t get out the pitchforks in 2008 we aren’t going to be getting them out.
I think ultimately Airbnb has helped people stay in homes. Layoffs over the past 10 years have put many families in financial jeopardy. Room/home rentals have helped many.
But there has always been a difficult landlord/tenant dynamic.
Even on a quick skim, this is nothing more than insipid ramblings.
.
He is not even a homeowner or a host. How very entitled, to be renting from others and having worthless opinions as to what others “should do with their property”.
He does seem to get that there are places like yours and mine, @muddy : “To be clear, renting out spare rooms, attics, basements, and backyards in owner-occupied properties isn’t the problem.”
But I wouldn’t want him as a tenant. Or anyone really, because once upon a time I was a reluctant landlord. So there’s that colouring my response.
I do own several pitchforks I should hang onto and rent out if it comes to that…
But he doesn’t exclude those in his proposal for limiting rentals to 14 days per year. In fact, he specifies “all owner-occupied properties” in that. If he thinks those aren’t an issue, why does he think they should be limited to 14 days?
Where I live in Australia, my state of New South Wales has put in place a registration requirement by November first.
Every local council was asked to take part in the construction of the new rules.
In my area there will be 3 sets of limits regarding availability to rent, for entire homes. In host share homes are fine.
I am fine - 365 days.
Twenty minutes away in the coastal villages - 180 days, unless you are a tourist approved development.
In Byron Bay they are facing a 90 day limit.
The main purpose of this was to limit tourists being housed in residential areas. These new rules have been flagged for the last 3 years….
The ITS NOT FAIR has started
He should have just confined his point to not allowing purely str investment properties, which is what takes housing for locals off the market.
??? My home isn’t an investment property. I bought the lot and built the house as my home, not with intention of using it for strs. That I decided to list my guest room somewhere along the way doesn’t make it an investment property.
I totally misunderstood you, sorry.
I’m of 2 minds about the vacation homes. If it’s a vacation home that the owner uses a good deal of the time themselves, it isn’t really owner-occupied, their primary residence is elsewhere but it’s not just an investment property.
But if they are really only interested in making money off renting it out as an str, and only stay there themselves if they have a vacant slot, that’s an investment property to me.
It’s obvious he’s disturbed because he can’t find decent and affordable housing where he lives. This happens in resort/vacation areas and in larger cities.
The answer is not to outlaw STRs. The reason why there is little affordable rental housing in much of the US is that building costs are now so high that builders have to build for the high end of the market in order to make a profit.
There is very little affordable rental housing in urban or suburban US communities unless it’s subsidized in some way, and Republicans have been trying to cut back on public housing subsidies for years. Of course the real answer is to require that employers pay a living wage so taxpayers aren’t subsidizing housing for their employees. I’m tired of paying Section 8 from my taxes because McD and MalWart pay so little.
My property is an investment property, yet oddly owner occupied as my business office is part of the property. I built a second unit on the property solely to rent out STR.
If I was regulated out of doing STR’s the cabins would sit vacant. I am not going to have tenants especially so close to me.
I just want to retire someday.
RR
There’s a variation of that is common in USA retirement areas.
I’m doing a version of this with short term rentals. My ultimate goal is to live there. It’s kind of a temporary investment property. Like @RiverRock I hope to retire someday
My area is full of investment buyer / rentals. This has a different flavor because eventually the owner will live there.
Sounds similar in principle to the Enoch Powell rivers of blood speech …(UK Member of Parliament) of which none of his predictions are true in today’s UK society (answers on a postcard please…)
The speech warned that if the UK continued along the path it was taking, there would be a violent outcome in those areas or parts of the community it impacted upon.
I hope I understand the sentiments in his article about the future but that doesn’t mean I agree with his fore warnings of mass pillaging. I see it as a suggestion that at some stage in the future there will need to be another shift in the market to a different model, it’s just been poorly presented by his article.
It’s a prime function of a capitalist society to make money in the most profitable way it can, whether that be paying the lowest wage to people (some of whom may be cleaners of STR’s) or extracting the highest price from the consumers of products or services (Inc STR’s), so I’m my opinion it’s a natural progression of capitalism to move (or be moved, as different business models are curtailed by local governance) into the STR market, which started off as a completely different business model.
As an example, in most ‘seaside’ UK towns, there was a period when every large property, and some smaller ones, were turned into Houses of (or in) Multiple Occupation, basically every living area was turned into a one roomed home. This allowed single persons to rent somewhere to live at an affordable rate, of course it was abused by many landlords to produce low quality housing at very low rates, which attracted a lot of people with ‘troubled’ backgrounds. This led to a degradation of the local area and a lack of large houses for large families in the area, so they moved out and the cycle continued, until Regulation 4 legislation was introduced prohibiting any more HMO’s.
So then the vacant properties were bought by investors into the LTR market, who quickly pushed up rents as less properties were available. That meant prices of properties increased, diminishing the returns on investment, and as ever, the market looked for ways to increase their profits, then along came the perfect solution for the period in time in the form of STR’s.
It’s all a natural and predictable process of following the profit, and the person who can identify the next move of the market is out there somewhere …
PS, can you let me in on it early doors if it’s you ??