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
You can easily regulate against that.
How
Through the tax code. If you have a short term rental property that’s not a primary residence: shazam busted. You’d need some kind of policing for it but you could force airbnb to make a filing on it as well which would make it possible to automate.
No regulation is worth anything without enforcement.
Sure. That’s step two. You gotta do step one first.
I agree. It wasn’t meant to be against regulations. Problem is in my city we have plenty of regulations to avoid repurposing flats for tourist rentals without a permit, we have regulations against systematically letting flats empty to be able to sell the house or flat at a premium etc. But we only have like three dozen government employees, who are supposed to oversee a city with more than 1.5 million flats and individual homes. So even if every one of them manages to check on 2 flats every day, they manage like 15.000 flats a year, which is already a rather optimistic estimate.
It is crucial to not only demand regulation, but also that enough resources are assigned to enforce them.