Posted by Leonard Steinberg on April 21st, 2014

AIRBNB is under attack by New York Law that prevents the rental of any apartment for less than 30 days.  Nearly two-thirds of the New York apartments recently listed on Airbnb were being offered in violation of the law:  64% of its 19,500-plus offerings covered an entire apartment, says an affidavit from the state Attorney General’s Office. By law, a “permanent resident” must be present to sublet an apartment for fewer than 30 days.

New York Law basically does not allow you to sub-lease your home for less than 30 days at a time……is this what they call the ‘home of the free’? Why is it that in almost every other part of the world you can rent a home for a week at a time? AIRBNB is certainly posing a tough question for us when it comes to our freedoms: does the hotel industry lobby control our freedoms as to what we are allowed to do with our owned property? Naturally if you are leasing a property and your lease prevents any form of sub-leasing, the AIRBNB concept is not allowed, and rightfully so. Most condominiums have house rules that prevent sub-leasing for anything less than 12 months…..very few allow 6 month sub-leasing. But what if you own an entire townhouse without any house rules?

I am not an advocate of super-short-term rentals at all as I feel they can impact the quality of life for other owners in a building. Maybe instead of banning this concept entirely (and making New York look very un-American and un-worldly) very strict guidelines should be formulated and enforced. Maybe AIRBNB has to instigate very large security deposits so that abusers are automatically fined for bad behavior or abuses? We have all read some bad abuses of the AIRBNB concept, but I feel certain groups with ulterior motives are behind these ‘ugly revelations’. Isn’t the success of AIRBNB a direct result of many grossly inflated hotel room rates that deliver less-than-stellar quality?