[gerner]

In some ways, this is the dark side of disrupting established industries: legal protections aren't in place yet; it's not clear what recourse people caught in never before seen corner cases have.

We (e.g. HN folks) are quick to applaud people with new ideas that are shaking things up (e.g. Airbnb, Uber, etc.) I suspect this is the sort of scenario detractors (e.g. Seattle City Council re: Uber) are worried about.

Terrible situation, clearly. Still, important to see some of these scenarios actually play out. And it raises all the right questions: what should Airbnb do going forward? what should legal protections be going forward? should someone have seen this coming? and should they be held liable for it?

(edit: typo)

[_delirium]

I'm not sure these are "never before seen corner cases". This kind of stuff is pretty much Landlording 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in renting a property to know about eviction laws. This person wasn't even engaging in what you might call the new, casual-sharing-of-personal-possessions style of rental, where someone rents their own personal apartment out occasionally while they're on vacation. She was just doing the old-school landlord thing: she bought an investment property she did not live in, and was renting it full-time for profit. That is a line of business in which you can buy and read books, customized to your state, telling you exactly the basics you should know about!

[URSpider94]

This kind of stuff is pretty much Chauffeuring 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in driving for hire (through Lyft or UberX) to know about hack laws.

This kind of stuff is pretty much Retailing 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in selling items on the open market (through eBay) to know about business laws.

What's "disruptive" about all of these services is that they enable people who wouldn't ordinarily be willing to go through all the red tape and training to enter a previously specialized business, to do so with a few mouse clicks.

One could argue that all of these services (AirBnB, Lyft, eBay) are targeted at amateurs who want to dabble, but we all know that they make a significant amount of revenue from people who are using their platforms to run full-scale businesses, in many cases without securing business licenses, liability insurance, paying relevant taxes and fees, etc.

I don't know if I'd say that the services themselves are responsible, but they are certainly happy to take profit from high-volume vendors operating outside the law.

[sanderjd]

I think you're completely right, but it's worth noting that removing barriers to entry into existing businesses is a very viable business model. Even "buying and reading books customized to your state" is a barrier to entry that a company like AirBnB could help with (though they don't seem to want to go that direction).

[pstuart]

But Airbnb, as a service, should at least filter/advise for knowingly stupid things like renting out for such an extended period.

[chimeracoder]

If they're going to that effort, then why can't they filter for knowingly illegal things, like short-term rentals in cities in which this practice is illegal?

I don't see them doing either one anytime soon, since it presents a major PR/deniability problem.

[pstuart]

They're pretty much knowingly illegal as a business model, but that doesn't mean they can't protect their own users from simple abuses.

[7Figures2Commas]

> In some ways, this is the dark side of disrupting established industries: legal protections aren't in place yet...

That's simply not true. The homeowner voluntarily agreed to rent her home to someone for more than 30 days. On the 30th day, that person became a tenant and gained certain rights under the law. The homeowner still has legal rights of her own, but the nature of the rental she agreed to means that she will have to engage in a more involved process to evict the tenant. If the homeowner did not want to deal with this type of scenario, she had every right not to rent her home for 30+ days.

In short, this has nothing to do with disruption or a lack of legal protections. Notwithstanding the fact that some AirBnB properties are being rented in violation of local laws and leases, AirBnB is simply a channel for marketing rental properties. The law already provides landlords and tenants with protections and obligations and every serious party engaged in the rental business is familiar with these laws. This story has everything to do with a homeowner engaging in a business she clearly knew nothing about.

[sanderjd]

> every serious party engaged in the rental business is familiar with these laws

AirBnB's disruption is to enable unserious parties to engage in the rental business, so the negative effects of unserious parties engaging in the rental business can pretty reasonably be laid at the feet of that disruption.

[_delirium]

For really casual renters I can see that: I think the "couchsurfing for money" type of AirBnB really is new, and brings in casual renters looking to rent out a couch or a spare room, or occasionally a spare apartment while they themselves are gone.

But dabbling into full-time landlording, where you buy an apartment just to rent it out, is not really new or newly enabled by AirBnB. It's not like VRBO checks your sanity either; if you want to not pay attention to rental laws and get screwed on VRBO you could do that, too. Probably that has even happened, but nobody cares, because there's a cultural expectation that if you're renting an investment property on VRBO, you have an idea of what you're doing, and if not, that's your problem.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, maybe regulators will be able to figure out how to rein in the second use case without messing up the first. But that sounds pretty idealistic.

[aikah]

Airbnb,Uber,Kickstarter... shift all the risk on users/owners/renters/drivers/backers.

That's what make their business model very profitable.

Very low risk,they are not providing any real service but connecting 2 people,while still taking a good chunk of each transaction. "It's just a market place,just like an ad in a newspaper",at least,that's what they say.

So their business is not illegal per say.Only those who actually provide the real service face risks.

[jonnathanson]

Airbnb makes it easier for naive or unsophisticated "landlords" to rent out their properties. Yes, those would-be landlords should educate themselves about what they are getting into. But you could argue that Airbnb, by dint of its existence and its success, is lowering the barriers to entry for the would-be landlords of the world -- and thus bears a social and ethical, if not necessarily a legal, responsibility to educate or protect those people from common mistakes. And besides, it's just good business to watch out for your customers.

The woman in question was not aware of the problems involved in 30+-day leases. We can fall back on the idea that she was ignorant, and that she got what was coming to her. True. But that's victim-blaming, and it's only half satisfactory. She is the kind of person who would not have invested in, and rented out, a property without the existence of a hand-holding site like Airbnb. Accordingly, Airbnb should do its part to ensure that people like her -- people entering the market because of Airbnb, and who are presumably unsophisticated -- are reasonably protected from rookie mistakes.

I don't think Airbnb is to blame here. I don't think Airbnb owes her any money. But I do think it should be thinking very carefully about how to retool its process, so that situations like these don't pop up again. Not for legal reasons, but for UX reasons. Airbnb operates a two-sided marketplace, and maintaining that two-sided marketplace means balancing the needs of both sides of the market.

It seems that Airbnb is offering to assist her with her legal expenses, and I applaud them for that. No, they probably don't have to do that. But "We don't have to" is a pretty lousy excuse to fall back on. Customer service matters, even if it means protecting your customers from their own mistakes (within reason).

[7Figures2Commas]

If you read some of my previous comments[1] on AirBnB, you'll see that I question many of the company's practices. AirBnB has constructive knowledge that some of its "hosts" are violating the law in certain cities where it is well-publicized that short-term rentals are illegal. And it has constructive knowledge that there are virtually no apartment leases that permit renters to turn their apartments into hotel rooms through short-term sublets.

But this story doesn't fall into those categories and your line of reasoning is not convincing. From what has been published, the so-called "victim" purchased a condo hundreds of miles away from her actual residence as an investment with the intention of producing income through vacation rentals. She was marketing its availability on multiple sites, not just AirBnB. AirBnB and the current crop of sites like it didn't create the vacation rental market. This market existed well before the advent of the internet. Before AirBnB emerged, there was no shortage of unsophisticated individuals trying their hand at real estate.

Making the landlord a particularly unsympathetic character here is the fact that, in the original article about this situation, she admitted to seeing warning signs early on. Instead of terminating the rental well before 30 days had elapsed when her gut told her that there was something off about her "guest", she decided to let the guest stay.

There's a saying, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered." I have absolutely no doubt that AirBnB could "retool its process" as you suggest and it still wouldn't prevent situations like this because no "process" is going eliminate greed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896538

[jonnathanson]

Fair enough critique of the woman in this story. Let's temporarily put aside the nature of her failings. I'd still describe them as naiveté more than greed, per se, but regardless, we can agree she has failings. She's not a very sympathetic protagonist. But let's talk about others like her.

Do you not agree that Airbnb is probably attracting a fair number of would-be landlords to the market who would not be in the market otherwise? Yes, the vacation rental market existed long before Airbnb. No, I don't buy the implication that Airbnb is only attracting people who would have operated in the pre-Airbnb vacation market. Clearly Airbnb has expanded the supply side of this market, at least somewhat by enticing new entrants into it, many of whom are probably unversed in the laws and regulations they should be versed in. That's not Airbnb's fault, but it is Airbnb's headache.

Regardless of our sympathies toward this woman in this particular case, she might be a canary in a coal mine. There are plenty of theoretical Airbnb hosts, and perhaps actual hosts, who could very easily take the plunge on Airbnb without coming to grips with the ins and outs of rental laws. They would assume, furthermore, that because Airbnb exists and thrives, then surely it must have sorted out the fine print.

Airbnb can take actions to prevent this situation from happening again. That doesn't necessarily mean blocking 30+-day rentals, or cutting back on the range of options one can undertake on Airbnb. But it probably means providing more information, at the very least, triggered by certain actions taken when posting a listing. Not because they have to, but because they know that their business model creates an "easy button" for a lot of unsophisticated users. That's a fine business model. But if you're going to do that, then you need to design prophylactic solutions to protect people from their own stupidity [greed/arrogance/naiveté/haste/whatever we want to call it in any given case]. You can't protect them from everything, but at the very least, you can learn and adapt as you go.

Not every PR hiccup deserves a complete redesign of the UX flow, of course. And no solution fixes every potentiality. So you evaluate the problems on a case-by-case basis as they emerge, estimating the likelihood that they'll happen again, and weighing the costs of a fix against the benefits. I'm not a fan of preemptively freaking out about possible edge cases. But when something like this happens, at the very least, you need to analyze whether it's a ridiculous edge case, or whether it's likely to happen again.

And who knows? Maybe this woman's mistake serves a sorting function, and the problem solves itself. Nobody will make her mistake again. Or so we'd hope.

[7Figures2Commas]

The internet has created and expanded many markets. I am sure there are folks who considered the availability of services like AirBnB when making a decision to invest in a rental property, just as I'm sure there are folks who started a new business in part because they believed internet advertising would make it easy to reach potential customers. Should Google inform unsophisticated advertisers that they might lose tens of thousands of dollars on AdWords campaigns if they don't know what they're doing or overestimate response rates?

At the end of the day, you refuse to believe the simple fact that even if AirBnB goes out of its way to inform its "hosts" that their use of its service might subject them to certain laws, risks, etc., folks like the landlord in question will continue to click on your so-called "easy button" because whether greedy or naive, many people simply don't consider the possibility that anything bad can happen to them. Until it actually happens of course.

As I pointed out, the landlord here is on record stating that she ignored her own gut feeling about her tenant from hell after there were early indications he'd be trouble. If an individual presented with clear and specific warning signs that trigger an instinctual unease is willing to ignore such signals, why do you believe such an individual would make a better decision when presented with, say, a popup containing abstract warnings?

As for the idea that this story will prevent other such stories, the landlord in question is hardly the first landlord to have to deal with a rental gone bad and she won't be the last. Situations like these are not uncommon, and today's crop of real estate newbies makes the same mistakes that real estate newbies were making 20 years ago. The only reason this got any attention at all was that the so-called victim played up the AirBnB angle, which many people correctly recognized as being a red herring.

[thrownaway2424]

You seem to be confused about what legal protections are or are not in place, and whom the law protects. This isn't some loophole or edge case in the law, this is an explicit protection for lessee which is written into the law for a specific reason. "Legitimate slumlords", if you can tolerate such a concept, are well aware of this provision, and will bodily remove you and your belongings from their flop houses on the 29th day.

This is just an example of a person with barely enough capital to dabble in capitalism and lose. They thought they were going to flip a condo into rental income, skirted the law -- one wonders what other shortcuts were taken; did they have an occupant's insurance policy or a landlord's policy? did they take out a mortgage under the pretense of occupancy? Are they taking income tax interest deductions and claiming homeowner's property tax exemptions -- and pretty much got what they had coming.

[mattdeboard]

"Did they break the law? Are they immoral heathens? I'm not saying that the answer to either of these is yes, but isn't it interesting that I'm the only one asking such questions?"

This post is really the ultimate in weasel-y, passive-aggressive muckraking. If you've got a point, make it.

[sliverstorm]

These scenarios are why AirBnb can make money (IMO).

If you think about it simplistically, AirBnb sidesteps regulation. As a result, the biggest use-case for AirBnb is leases that are supposed to be against regulations.

AirBnb can't avoid messes AND regulations. Avoiding regulations is their profit model! With that comes messes. But that's OK for them- they have pretty successfully outsourced the risk to their hosts.

That's the thing that annoys me the most about Uber and AirBnb. They are no fools; they know what they are doing. And when you boil it down, what they are doing smells a lot like what the banks did running up to 2006- socialize the risk, privatize the profit.

[jack-r-abbit]

It is unclear to me if one could pull the same thing at an actual hotel or not. Assuming you could find a hotel that had a room available for more than 30 days, would they book you for that long? Or do they already have a policy against that for this very reason? Or do they have some different protection under the law that makes it easier to make you leave when your stay has ended?

[tzs]

There are different rules for hotels/motels. In particular, if the manager has a right of access and control, and all of the following are true:

• occupancy of less than 7 days is allowed (this doesn't mean your occupancy has to be less than 7 days)

• a fireproof safe is provided for residents' use

• it has a central telephone service

• it has maid, mail, and room service

• it has food service provided by a food establishment on or next to the hotel/motel grounds and that is operated in conjunction with the hotel/motel,

then California classifies you as a guest, not a tenant, and no matter how long you stay there you can be kicked out as soon as you fail to pay, with no need for any kind of eviction proceeding.

More details here: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/whois.shtml