RE: AirBnB Horror Story

brogan1 wrote:

2 more wrote:

Man, they are used. You cannot use them forever. The ones they left behind were prolly the ones they couldn't use no more.

I've been around the block but never got involved with meth and don't know how many times pipes can be used. "Ignorance is Bliss" said they could be used multiple times. Twice? 5x? 10x? Whatever. They probably were unusable if they were left behind but I was just surprised with the amount of crap "likely stories" took for a reasonable speculation.

Regardless of which blocks you've been around, you do realize that new, unused goods are typically more valuable than used goods right? A new pipe would be worth $5, but a used one wouldn't be.

Plus if you speculate that there is 10 or more pipes, but then you are confused that they get used up, why on earth do you think they have so many pipes?

MAYEROFF wrote:

I don't know of any craigslist murders, but I know there have been people raped.

Craigslist killings in Boston and San Diego-

As others have said, there is risk in everything and airbnb sounds like a nice idea in theory. But for me the risk in letting strangers rent my home is more risk than I'm willing to take.

Maybe they're from Seattle or Vancouver, BC where taxpayers give out free crack pipes. If you're a crackhead and can get free taxpayer funded pipes why not be wasteful with them?

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/08/02/vancouver-handing-out-50000-worth-of-crack-pipes/

I know there are lots of people who would smoke more if the government would just give them free cigarettes. After all it worked with the GI's in WWII.

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You should spend sometime reading what was actually written. I'm reading the facts in a poorly written article:

"There's also a California law that prevents unfair competition, which might apply to people who rent rooms on a short-term basis without going through the same process that legitimate hotels and bed and breakfasts do."

--It doesn't apply right now in SF, so they are not skirting around anything.

"Members of the San Francisco Tenants Union say they've found several buildings that evicted tenants in order to convert the property into a tenancy-in-common or condominium, only to instead effectively turn the spaces into permanent hotel rooms. This could not be independently verified."

--Complete BS that is not verified, but we will print it anyway.

The business model has proved itself before with VRBO and other sites, so that's a moot point.

And if you don't want the IRS snooping around, just report the income correctly and there won't be problem.

When we sell something on Craigslist, I meet the person in front of my apartment building.

That said, at least with Air BnB people have reviews. You can choose to rent to people that have good reviews. Craigslist could bring any kind of creep into your house.

i've been surprised by how few media outlets reporting on airbnb have pointed out this obvious problem. you can't rent out living quarters short term in most localities without having a hotel license and without collecting hotel taxes.

while it may be true that the license issue falls on the lessor/sublessor of the property, the hotel tax collection issue seems a little more complicated and it may well fall on airbnb - similar to how sales taxes are collected at the point of sale.

these are the kinds of issues that go unnoticed by regulators and the established business community (i.e. large hotel chains) when companies are tiny. if airbnb actually manages to scale up, it is going to have to address these issues.

for now, at least, i don't see them doing so and frankly i don't see an easy way to do so. there is an inherent conflict between the need for users of the site to know the identity of their counterparty and the desire of lessors/sublessors to remain anonymous so that the government can't regulate them.

I rent out my apartment from time to time. I've had four different people stay there, and had contact with a few others. We found each other on Craigslist. They did some background checks on me, and I did some checks on them. We were both open in sharing information, and I was comfortable by the time I met them.

AirBNB wouldn't let me interact with the people first. And it was unwieldly to use.

I only had one or two dealings with rude people on Craigslist. And they weren't that rude, just inconsiderate in that they didn't call back to indicate that they were not interested.

Anyone who actually did a vacation rental was lovely!

Maybe a dumb question, but if someone trashes your house after you rent it would it be covered by home owner's or renter's insurance? Not that that could get everything back but it might help.

Imagine the premiums increase if you told your insurance agent that you rent out your living room couch to meth addicts and genocidal Nazi Z i o n e r s ;-)

no doubt wrote:

Class Action lawsuit pending.

It's not a very big class. Two or three people in it maybe?

I host two bedrooms in my home through Airbnb and make around $20K a year. This is without even accepting everyone who requests a stay. I do discriminate and hit the reject offer button often. I trust my gut feeling. I know Airbnb is going towards the "you have to accept everyone" business model, but I do not agree with this model on a owner occupied shared home.

PastelCurtains wrote:

I host two bedrooms in my home through Airbnb and make around $20K a year. This is without even accepting everyone who requests a stay. I do discriminate and hit the reject offer button often. I trust my gut feeling. I know Airbnb is going towards the "you have to accept everyone" business model, but I do not agree with this model on a owner occupied shared home.

So you rent out rooms in your house while you're living in it? You eat in the kitchen and watch TV with strangers in the living room? That seems so weird to me. I would neither rent nor rent out a place unless it was a whole house/apt.