It’s hard to run a business from a long distance away.
There are just too many people ready and willing to take advantage of you.
Airbnb might be finding that out the hard way.
The huge short-term leasing brokerage company has always had its detractors; some point to the way it’s distorting rental markets, even in smaller Atlantic cities like Charlottetown and Halifax, shrinking the pool of available rental properties for lower-income renters who have few other options.
There have been complaints about the business double standard involved, how Airbnb users don’t pay the same taxes and commercial fees as others in the tourism and hotel business, about price undercutting and fluctuating standards.
Still, the company has extended its reach worldwide, with almost 150,000 listings in Canada alone.
While it is offering a genuine source of new income for dedicated honest owners, like any business with offshore oversight, it’s attracted unsavoury operators, too — people willing to break the rules to make money, knowing that it’ll take time for a remote company to find and discipline or remove them.
There have been complaints about the business double standard involved, how Airbnb users don’t pay the same taxes and commercial fees as others in the tourism and hotel business, about price undercutting and fluctuating standards.
Right now, the company is the target of extra attention because of those bad actors.
Barely a day goes by without some sort of unpleasant revelation in the media.
There have been stories about large Ontario homes being used as regular weekend party spots, hosting hundreds of revelers while frustrated neighbours and municipalities have no ability to control the transient renters and the noise and mayhem they can attract.
Wednesday, the Globe and Mail reported on illegal boarding houses, citing an example in North York where a five-bedroom single family home was offering 35 different “guest rooms” for as little as $10 a night. As far as amenities went, some of the “rooms” were a simple mattress amid rows of stacked bunkbeds.
There have been complaints about ghost hotels, where a rental suite turns out to be one of a number of rooms in a complex being operated as an off-the-books hotel, right down to professional housekeeping services, but without desk staff or management to call when trouble arises.
There are still many, many success stories: happy homeowners able to make extra money, satisfied customers able to rent unusual spaces for less money than they’d spend in formal hotels.
But in some ways, it’s becoming the victim of its own success: the free-form structure that created it in the first place might just end up causing the company’s collapse.
Oversight from cities frustrated by complaints have already started, with large metro areas like Toronto limiting the number of rooms that owners can offer and the number of nights they can be rented out. Other municipalities are requiring owners to register their properties, and are charging new taxes and fees for the short-term rental business.
Rest assured, more oversight is coming.
