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I live in a huge AirBnb market relative to city size (for scale, the city is 400k people, and we have had more peak listings than the capital which is a huge tourist city itself of 15m people)...it has destroyed the community here. Totally. Every spare of piece of land is built on because properties were converted overnight (against local regulations), aggressive rental practices that you only see in larger cities became commonplace (small three bedroom flats are being broken up into six bedrooms), whole areas of the city are now deserted most of the year, properties lying empty with homeless people lying in the doorstep. I used to live somewhere that was full of families and young people, every single flat in the block is now AirBnb...bar one, which is occupied by a 91-year old woman whose husband recently died of cancer and can't move...she gets treated as "the help" by angry AirBnbers (she has people trying to get in her apartment, ringing her door late at night, etc.) but... ...I don't think that is what angered people. That was bad. But AirBnb not only circumvented the spirit of local laws (taxes being one example), they actually assisted property owners in breaking laws. Not just the spirit of the law. Not just a weird loophole. Because we had a big rental market before AirBnb existed, we had laws that existed for every eventuality but one assumption was that holiday rental companies would comply with local licensing laws...AirBnb refused. So we had a local council, budget cut 70% by central government, having to make the choice about whether to cut care services to disabled and the elderly or cut back on road maintainence, having to employ people to look at listings online and work out where properties were for licensing. Needless to say, that didn't work (the story has a happy ending, the council is introducing fines that will bankrupt property owners for failing to comply, is banning listings altogether in some cases, and has said that more severe measures if neither works). That is why AirBnb is successful here. People often complain about hotels or the lack of regulations...where I am: every single city had regulations for holiday rentals. AirBnb ignored all of them. AirBnb didn't invent tourism, we had them before and we will have them after, they didn't lead us to become richer. A small group did, everyone else became poorer. And this is a case of a company that only exceeded competitors in its willingness to break and ignore rules, and assisted others in doing the same. I will invest in O&G, miners, social media, gun manufacturers, I don't care...they are just filling a need. Never AirBnb. Even grouped amongst companies doing shitty things (palm oil, payday lending being two that occur immediately), they are definitely up there. |