[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.