Airbnb's success story stands out in stark contrast to the struggles of other startups. Unlike Zillow's disastrous attempt at house-flipping, Airbnb has flourished for over a decade. Their revenue skyrocketed, tripling from $3.3 billion to nearly $10 billion. Even more impressive, they flipped profitability, going from annual losses of $4-5 billion to earning the same staggering amount. Perhaps the strongest indicator of their dominance is their resilient stock price. Unlike the post-IPO crashes
They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.