My Dad recently needed a place to live. No matter how far I drew the circle on Zillow in our part of the state, there were no rent houses, for any price. I texted my realtor about it and asked if it was the Airbnb effect. She said “Yes, probably.”
I would say a much bigger problem is the lack of building, and the lack of new houses.
The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed.
The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).
I'm pro-YIMBY, but building more will only solve part of the problem. The problem it won't solve is that our winner-take-all economy is winner-take-all for cities, too. Everyone is pouring into the top n metro areas and even the most ambitious building program won't do more than put a small dent in all that demand. A small dent will make a real difference for a lot of people, but it also won't make much of a difference for a lot more.
If we can't figure out a way to get people to live in Cleveland and St. Louis again, we're spitting into the wind.
Obviously, we should just build more world-class metro areas.
Of course, top-down planning a city (as would be needed to "stamp" one out whole) has never worked; but how about we copy-and-paste the zoning plans from cities we already know are functional, and then incentivize all the same major companies that have headquarters in City The First to build secondary HQs in City The Second?
I'd look at subsidising 'desirable' small businesses for towns. Take a normal country town and prop up a little wine bar, grocery, couple of non-chain restaurants. Attract younger, remote workers and then eventually there'd be enough going on that the small businesses would survive on their own, and more would be naturally created.
> Attract younger, remote workers and then eventually there'd be enough going on
I think there may be something to this.
The other day I was riding around the French Pyrenees, and some (bigger) villages had signs along the lines of "fibered village", as in "with optic fiber". Along those were other signs about selling lots, mostly by the town hall.
I was thinking that maybe this could attract remote workers. The environment is beautiful (if you're into mountains), they have clean air, etc. It could be great for a remote worker.
But then it hit me. Say you'd go to one of those villages, with a girlfriend / wife, or you found one there, and wanted to have kids. They'd be able to go to elementary school. But probably starting in junior high, and certainly in high school, they'd have to take the school bus to the "local big town". Which is, basically, a commute.
So I got a feeling of "unfairness": people moving there to escape commutes, but then subjecting their young kinds to the same...
I disagree completely, the big cities are not even trying to build, and they could.
We need to tax land hoarders and use the proceeds to build public housing.
This will be sooooo much easier than trying to do business development in smaller cities. Those cities have already been doing their best to expand the job situation, but top down planning of jobs rarely works. Our top down planning to induce housing shortages is far easier to fix.
This is the main reason, but AirBnB isn't helping. Even when more housing is built, developers build housing that's meant primarily for short term rentals. The margins are high enough, and the obligations low enough, that running an illegal hotel can be much more profitable than finding long term tenants.
I was curious so I checked. US population grows about .5% per year and in the trailing 12 months to date new residential housing stock has increased around 1%.
Regarding home sales, Zillow generally pulls from local MLS databases, so unless it's for-sale-by-owner they tend to have all available homes. For home rentals, it'll be more fragmented.
> Regarding home sales, Zillow generally pulls from local MLS databases, so unless it's for-sale-by-owner they tend to have all available homes. For home rentals, it'll be more fragmented.
Can they even do that? My understanding is the local MLS databases are the closely guarded pet of "Realtors™". I was told that Realtors will always list on the MLS, and may or may not list on Zillow as a separate process, depending on if they think it's necessary.
Either Zillow is scraping data or there’s a data sharing agreement in place with the MLS; my family realtor has never had to individually list on Zillow when listing on Georgia MLS or FMLS.
I'll second the recommendation for Craigslist. Zillow is probably the last place I would look for a house to rent.
Short term rentals may end up being more profitable, but are also seriously more work, and a lot of the smaller landlords don't want that.
Then again, with the eviction moratorium and other regulations that make dealing with problem tenants becoming heavy handed, I dont think I would ever want to have long term renters either, so... good, long term renters get the worst end of the deal, I guess.
A rental would only be on Zillow if it's listed with a real estate agent on the MLS. Which is pretty rare for most rentals in my experience. They are also usually more expensive.
Well that sounds a little weird - you're saying people aren't renting out houses on platform X because they rent them out on platform Y?
It depends on where you live of course but my wife and I recently house shopped and inventory was super-tight because (a) fewer people were willing to have people in to see the place due to COVID (b) fewer people were moving out of houses and into apartments due to WFH and (c) many people were looking to move from apartments into houses.
There was also a big move out of cities - you could easily rent/buy in NYC but good luck finding something in the suburbs.
All of these factors would affect rental tightness/availability where you are. I'd look into that more, rather than accepting a vague "yes, probably" as an explanation.
> Well that sounds a little weird - you're saying people aren't renting out houses on platform X because they rent them out on platform Y?
No, they are saying they don't rent them out in the long-term residential rental market because renting them out in the short-term vacation/travel rental market yields more income.
Exactly. I did this — we bought a house that we intended to live in, but a work change made it impractical and financially infeasible to offload.
Short term rental was way more profitable than leasing the whole house. Rents are capped by low interest rates and the type of people who want to rent a four bedroom house are people more likely to be a problem in some way.
I did it for 4 years, from July to September. I would rent the furniture for a few months, have a cleaning service paid for the tenants and essentially rent the house for a week for the equivalent of 2-6 months rent.
You can rent monthly on Airbnb. If I can get a house for 1200/month on Airbnb vs what used to be available on Craigslist for 800 or 600 a month, is that Airbnb’s fault, or is it just the market rate now and it happens that Airbnb is the platform de jour ?
My conjecture wasn't that AirBnB is cheaper, but that the price of housing is what the market will bear.
Maybe the fact that a landlord that would usually have to find a new tenant though word of mouth or classified ads can now advertise to a much wider audience has the result of making the landlord more money and making housing more expensive.
Infuriating.