airbnb - what can you tell me...

Malthusian

beecher2 wrote: »

Berlin have banned them because they have pushed up the rent as so may properties were being used.

They're not banned. You need a permit from the city council to rent out a whole property. Letting someone stay in a spare room is presumably fine.

beecher2

Malthusian wrote: »

They're not banned. You need a permit from the city council to rent out a whole property. Letting someone stay in a spare room is presumably fine.

Should've said if renting the whole property, I always assume most tourists do this but I may well be wrong.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/airbnb-rentals-berlin-germany-tourist-ban-fines-restricting-to-protect-affordable-housing-a7008891.html

cells

Conrad wrote: »

What about the hassle factor - would I be constantly arranging keys handover, property cleaning etc etc?

Presumably only furnished property? My Letting Agent mate always guards against furnished as it leads to no end of hassles and additional regulator requirements and checks

Its probably 300x the Hassel as the average let is only 3-4 days according to what I've read. So rather than one tenant staying 3 years you have 300 'tenants' staying 3.5 days each. Actually its even worse than that say for instance you have a three bed house and you rent out each room on airbnb that would mean 900x as many keys/cleaning/visiting. If you value your time at zero then maybe it's sane.

When I had a look at the Hackney area it looked to me like the two main types of people listing properties were 1: tenants sub letting which of course is probably against their lease. 2: unemployed or retired council tenants letting out their spare rooms. In both instances the time and hassel and expense of traveling to the property is much lower or nil so it works for them.

I'm not sure how sane it is for landlords. Not only will it be impossible to achieve 100% occupancy (maybe 70%) but you also have to pay the bills and you effectively give 300 strangers a year a copy of your keys. When I did the sums with reasonable assumptions it didn't seem worth while. But of course for tenant sub letters and council tenants sub letting almost any figure is worthwhile as their marginal cost for the spare room is close to zero.

cells

beecher2 wrote: »

Berlin have banned them because they have pushed up the rent as so may properties were being used.

I dont believe this to be true. I'm sure people think it but it's likely false.

If you take London its one of the worlds most visited cities. Something along the scale of 15 million tourists each year. If you take the average stay as 1 week that's 15 million weeks worth or 288 thousand years worth. If the average Property can hold 3 tourists that converts to 96,000 properties.

So 96,000 properties as a max if hotels and proper BnBs didn't exist but of course they do and many people won't want to stay in what is effectively a poor mans hotel. So at the very most airbnb type outfits cab take 10% of the market which brings it towards 10,000 properties out of a stock of 3.5 million homes in London.

Or 0.3% of the housing stock once airvnb is established and been around for 20 years. That's nowt. It's only really 4 months worth of new builds.

And of course this also assumes airbnb takes up only dedicated properties and does not even factor in those renting spare rooms.

So it really is in the scheme of things a drop in the demand ocean. Every other city will have eve less of an impact as there will be far fewer tourists in most cities

cells

Conrad wrote: »

Ok so I just signed-up and did a test run as both a potential guest and host. For one thing the site is not very good - it kept focusing on places miles away and would not let me filter them out and narrow down the area (if it does, it's not clear and apparent how to).


As a host the returns indicated are little more than I get for standard rental, so deffo not for me

I looked into it but not a huge amount. From what I can tell it is indeed mostly used in the way it was original thought up for. Mostly people letting out their spare rooms.

In my area it looked like the biggest group were council tenants letting out their council homes/rooms. It's quite easy to tell which are the council homes in hackney. The other group was what I am fairly sure is tenants subletting rooms without permission.

I don't think there are many standalone landlords. A landlord in London can get 99% occupancy rate on an AST but I read its closer to 60-70% on airbnb. This makes sense no hotel or bnb can have full occupancy rates. The occupancy rate eats into most the excess daily rent. If the occupancy rate is 66.6% then you need to charge 150% rent just to cover the void period. Add in the bills and your time and you likely need 200% of the rent to break even and a lot of the time it looked like the achieved rents were less than 200% in which case its better to let a standard AST.

All of it indicated to me that it looked like an oversubscribed market which is only possible if it is dominated not by landlords but by social and normal rental tenants.

However I will say again this is just from general research it would be nice to have someone with actual experience letting out via airbnb to step in with some details


A friend of mine used to use booking.com for a very similar sort of thing short stay apartment rentals. He stopped when he realised a number of renters were prostitutes and their clients. I assume airbnb might also have that problem.

lisyloo

I used serviced apartments for a while in London before deciding if/where to rent.
The simplest solution to the key issue is to get a box on the wall with a 4 digit pin, then email it to the guests.
I would certainly expect clean sheets, towels and for the place to be clean.
We paid about £90 per night for studios in London (zone 1 or 2) - that's for somewhere to cook, somewhere to eat, sleep and bathroom even if it's all in one room.

Thrugelmir

Anybody know what % AirBNB take of the gross rent?

Eric_the_half_a_bee

Conrad wrote: »

My question is, why? What are the benefits compared with normal lettings on an AST contract?

I stayed in one recently. It was fine. The owner's explanation was, 2% commission instead of 10% commission.

Made sense to me

vivatifosi

Gen used to have an interesting take on the economics of AirBnB. It's a shame he can't be here to explain it.

michaels

Eric_the_half_a_bee wrote: »

I stayed in one recently. It was fine. The owner's explanation was, 2% commission instead of 10% commission.

Made sense to me

It is really more than that as they take a cut from both parties.

I bet bnbs and hotels hate it as locally private owners renting spare rooms undercut them considerably. I suspect the 7.2k tax free and not considered for benefits makes a big difference.