Their "NoiseAware" main product line also sounds incredibly dystopian. Apparently, that's a "privacy-safe" microphone listening in rental properties, to "detect crowds gathering"...!?
This type of creepy stuff, together with Airbnb's horrible business practices (last time they wanted access to my checking account transaction history via Plaid!) and enabling scammy hosts, is why I'm back to just staying at regular hotels.
Sad to see some of them are now start adopting the same type of customer-hostile technology as well.
AirBnB partiers are a real problem, I live in a tourist destination and regularly hear horror stories about a residential neighborhood suddenly having crowds descend on a house that's become a party rental. There's nobody to notice it getting out of hand and tell them to chill before the neighbors call the cops because the owner is a holding company on the other side of the country.
Of course Airbnbs are also a real problem in general with the way they increase the scarcity of housing, so I'm pretty happy all in all to see you saying you're being driven back to hotels.
I think repeatedly calling the police is the correct way to handle an AirBnB party house in your neighborhood. I don't want to instead have the unpaid job of monitoring the guests for the absentee owner and be responsible for telling them to chill.
Of course, a long term neighbor it is different. There the police would be a last resort.
Then don't rent your house. This is a risk of rental properties.
Look, if you have a house in a tourist spot and you say "no parties!", you're not gonna make any money. And if the residents don't like said parties, they can rally together to make AirBNBs illegal in their area. That's how many (most?) touristy places are.
This is just pushing the externalities to the residents. It takes several months for airbnbs to get banned, and it's tough for smaller cities to get the bans enforced.
There must be a better answer than "pass a law so the american multinational does a better job at regulating its rentals"
AirBnB rentals typically make more money for apartment and condo owners than long-term rentals, at least in big cities (that attract tourists) where there's often already scarce housing and not a lot of new affordable construction.
So as housing units get taken off the long-term market rental (i.e. actually being used for housing) to be turned into short-term rental for AirBnB, it reduces the available stock for renters.
And in many large cities small condos and purpose-built rentals are mostly what get built, because that's what investors are asking for - and builders build what they expect to sell and what they can profit on.
But then the investors who buy these "homes" don't actually put them up for rent, they turn them into short-term rentals for tourists and visitors, and those dwellings are not available for the people who actually need to live in the city.
This dual pressure on scarcity then drives up the rent on available properties because the demand goes up since there's less and less long-term rentals available for residents.
So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.
This is why many large metropolitan areas have either banned AirBnB or heavily regulated them (with mixed success, and rarely the honest participation of AirBnB themselves).
This tells me that you think that treating housing supply as a relevant factor to the price of housing is a stupidly obvious error.
> So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.
That you for agreeing that they do not prevent housing supply from increasing to meet the increased demand.
> This tells me that you think that treating housing supply as a relevant factor to the price of housing is a stupidly obvious error.
Nah it's just that we've had trolls in here before who try to make bad faith arguments about AirBnB, by pretending they don't see the problems created by turning housing into short-term rentals.
> > So they don't necessarily "prevent housing construction" (what housing gets built is a topic a bit too complex to get into here) but they absolutely do reduce available housing in large cities and in-demand areas, in the ways outlined above.
> That you for agreeing that they do not prevent housing supply from increasing to meet the increased demand.
I definitely don't agree with that. I said "necessarily" for a reason, meaning it's not the _only_ factor, nor it is _always_ a factor (depending on location etc) but it certainly is one of the major impacts on housing supply.
As for meeting demand, here's one way AirBnB is "preventing" supply from meeting demand:
Builders build what sells, and what buyers want. For the last while in many/most large western cities (I only know Canada and the US mostly, making a few loose assumptions here about elsewhere), real estate investors have been pushing for lots of single-bedroom condo units because those are the kinds of units that are popular as short-term rentals.
So builders prioritize these kinds of units for sale to investors who have no intention of making them available as housing, even though they are zoned and built as housing.
So... I think you can draw a pretty solid line between this kind of economic incentive and a lack of housing to meet demand, since there is a finite capacity for building housing (based on available builders - i.e. capital and manpower).
Secondly, remember impacting supply is not just about adding new housing but also about how affordable the available housing is.
When people convert existing housing to short-term rental, it reduces the total supply. And when you squeeze the supply, prices go up, and people get priced out of the places they live.
That reminds me - we're staying in an Airbnb later this summer and I've been meaning to research gadgets to detect hidden cameras. Now I guess I need to look out for microphones too. We're going in quite the dystopian direction.
Unless you get a nonlinear junction detector, I'm not sure any other device works as well. I remember seeing a news piece where they pay someone to plant a bunch of cameras, and the reporter tries a bunch of different devices and still misses some.
I suppose in theory you could have a device which doesn't have the storage or bandwidth to record/transmit full audio, but does some heuristics on the device and then transmits a small payload of flags. But in any case I wouldn't want to stay anywhere with an unaccountable black box ready to unfalsifiably charge me
The other commenter is absolutely right that partyers in AirBnBs cause nuisances for local residents, but the owners will have to find another way to sort that out or close up shop
Sure, but I’ll certainly not stay at a place putting me under privacy-invading surveillance on the suspicion that I don’t know basic etiquette.
I’ll also consider these things to be microphones unless their manufacturer explicitly says otherwise, yet on their website I’ve only seen vague assurances about them being privacy-friendly.
For some, “on-device speech recognition that only sends voice samples for cloud analysis in exceptional cases” would probably also meet that bar, but it doesn’t for me.
Not only that but it's used for "occupancy detection" to detect crowd sizes.
I once stayed at an AirBnB with some friends and the power went out in the evening one day of the trip. The next door neighbor also lost power, and came over to check on us - and didn't even step in the house. The next morning I got a nasty email from the host accusing me of abusing the occupancy limit. Clearly there were some hidden cameras or something in the house.
As silly as this example is, its just another annoying example of how technology is abused to monitor compliance with what should be a social issue.
The app even tracks the whole fee amount in-app being collected. "Net charge", "adjusted charge amount" reasons of "guest complaint"...