On Tuesday, AH&LA squared off against Airbnb as part of a daylong workshop held by the Federal Trade Commission on the sharing economy. Along with Vanessa Sinders, AH&LA’s department head of government affairs and David Hantman, Airbnb’s head of global public policy, the panel included representatives from Uber and the National League of Cities, as well as a former taxi commissioner. The event, which was open to the public, was organized to discuss the government’s place in overseeing the Internet peer-to-peer marketplace.
Sinders’ opening remarks touched on how the unregulated environment in which Airbnb operates is compromising consumer safety, endangering the character and security of residential neighborhoods around the country, and changing the housing market in some negative ways. “Hoteliers follow a strict set of rules and regulations to ensure the safety and security of guests and communities, and we take these responsibilities very seriously,” Sinders said. “But there are a lot of questions about whether the same can be said for these new companies, such as Airbnb.”
Countering these arguments, Hantman said that people doing something once in a while with their own property to make ends meet is very different than someone doing it full time as a business. He remarked that Airbnb has been doing a good job of regulating itself through extensive ratings systems and background checks. According to Hantman, the company has never been more transparent or safe than it is now. “It’s increasingly the case that online reputation systems that reward good behavior and punish bad behavior are serving much of the purposes served by government regulation,” he said.
Regarding the need to determine whether Airbnb was a platform for illegal hotels or for homeowners occasionally renting out rooms, Brooks Rainwater, center director of city solutions and applied research at the National League of Cities, stressed the need for the online rental marketplace to be more transparent and share the data it collects on who its hosts are and how much rental activity is going on. “We need to verify what’s happening,” he said. “I wonder what kind of a regulatory structure could be in place if we could see what’s actually happening in the home-sharing space.”
According to a report released last year by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, nearly three-quarters of all Airbnb rentals in New York City are illegal, violating zoning or other laws. Based on 497,322 Airbnb transactions between January 2010 and June 2014, Schneiderman’s report found the company largely made money for a small number of commercial hosts running large, multimillion-dollar operations. The multi-room hotels housed in the condo and apartment buildings owned by these large operators supplied more than a third of the city’s units and generated more than a third of the revenue. The numbers cited in this report have been disputed by Airbnb.
