[piva00]

Thriving business model while the slow cooker of regulations don't catch up to them.

There are reports of some touristic cities starting to cap Airbnb rentals, or just outright outlawing them. It's for good measure, Airbnbs in Barcelona, Lisboa and a number of other European cities have priced out the local population, investors buying 4-10 apartments on the same house to rent out as short-term rentals.

Airbnb created a pressure in the housing market that didn't exist before, for cities that already suffered with housing it really really sucks.

So it's the same as Uber: get into a regulatory grey area, capture the market and then fight over so regulations don't catch up with you. The whole business model of Airbnb was based on avoiding regulations, landlords have used this to prop up their short-term profits as it's much more profitable to rent out an Airbnb in Barcelona for 7-10 days per season-month than renting it out long-term monthly throughout the year.

[collyw]

Renting and buying property was already a pain in the arse in Barcelona before Airbnb, but they certainly didn't help.

[thesimon]

> Airbnbs in Barcelona, Lisboa

Lots of places in Lisbon list their AL number, indicating they are registered places for renting out.

Locals have been priced out of Lisbon for a long time, but seems like restricting airbnbs has not limited it too much.

[odshoifsdhfs]

Can't say for Lisboa, but in Algarve, half of those AL numbers aren't the actual owners. AL numbers actually work with residents/landlords and they rent the place, but it isn't owned by them, and give a cut to the owners.

(Know a few friends that would bunch up together in a house for July/August as 'entrepreneurs' would offer them 1-2K for their house for those two months to manage it and rent it themselves in AirBnB and other platforms)

[unishark]

Illegal taxis and rental housing (whether short or long term) have been around forever though. And they weren't just a fringe thing. College students and immigrant groups may predominantly use them in many places. If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.

[piva00]

Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

The same applies to illegal taxis and housing, yes, they were problems before but you didn't have a centralised global network of rentals (many illegal) connecting to the market of people looking for accommodation. The scale is the problem here.

[unishark]

> Illegal child pornography, terrorism radicalisation and other modern issues have also been around forever, it doesn't mean that the scale and leverage of the internet haven't made it worse, at least in tooling.

Ergo I can't disprove causation with my argument? I certainly concede that. For one thing it's a negative, not to mention the fact that you can't prove causation either. But then I don't concede it should be assumed true unless proven otherwise. Further, I can make arguments against it of course. And I made not one, but three: that it existed already, it was not a fringe activity (like, say, terrorism or child porn), and three that effects blamed on uber/airbnb can be explained by larger cultural changes. I think there's a bias in these arguments towards the experience of a certain group of people who actually travel the world and use apps to do so.

[maccard]

> If there's a current increase in such things, I'd blame it on the factors and regulations restricting the legal supply of these things rather than on airbnb/uber.

Curious, do you live in a city that's affected by this? I live in Edinburgh, and it's a massive problem here, almost entirely due to AirBnb. It's widely reported on pretty much every news source in the UK that the cause of this issue is Airbnb's (and other short term holiday lets), in a massive number of cases operating illegally (last number I saw was that <100 of the 7000+ lets in the 100sq miles of Edinburgh were legally registered)