this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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AirBNB used to be about just renting a room in your house out to people. Before it got big it wasn't for being a multi-property short-term landord.
Actually, vrbo was more like that - vrbo was around long before airbnb and was meant to be a way to help market your short term rental or like rent your vacation house out while you werent using it.
The problem is they each fill a niche, the need for short term accommodation with privacy for a group, but its super easy to take advantage and start listing huge numbers of properties to make lots of money if youre a ~~leech~~ landlord - which is part of why we're in such a bad situation now with the housing market.
So like, limit the number of listings that one person and/or company can have (and for those with more than one listing, vet those more stringently)? This has always been a very "duh" solution; but they need to be forced to adopt the policy, as they dgaf since they are making monayyyy from it.
But then what's to stop one bad owner from just making 15 different accounts for their 15 different properties?
And from the users perspective, there's reasons to prefer that all the properties under the same owner are tied to the same account. If bad reviews are happening it's easier to see the pattern if all the properties on the account have bad reviews.
Not that I don't generally agree with you, I just think that it's a complicated enough issue that just limiting the number of listings per person won't totally solve.
Require a govt ID (and run that ID through a db to make sure it's legit) for each host. Cross reference with who is the legal owner's name on all properties; if company, base on the owner of company (avoids 'I'll just make 5 companies' workaround). Even more basic stuff like 'if more than 1 account is using the same bank account, flag for review'. This stuff isn't hard, it's just not in use currently.