[jakewins]

The problem, I suppose, is that having the ability to choose who stays in your house is a big selling point. If someone requests our spare room, but they have many other hosts giving them bad reviews, we will reject them.

We make most of our AirBnB revenue on big events, a weekend or two a month. If we kept losing those weekends because the first person to apply was someone we didn't want to share the apartment with, that'd make it pretty pointless for us to use the platform.

[ThrustVectoring]

That'd also be a valuable-ish service - have someone with bad reviews apply very early to competitor's places during big events, for the sole purpose of getting denied and preventing actual costumers from renting from places that aren't yours.

[mvid]

It would only be valuable while unknown, as soon as it was known by a large enough crowd it would cause a viral reaction blowing out all availability for some big event.

[ryuker16]

Denying pre approval is easy and no damage to your rep.