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SFPD Arrests Suspect In Airbnb Rental Trashing
theodp writes "Just days after it was reported that apartment sharing startup Airbnb had raised $112MM at a $1B+ valuation from investors that included Marc Andreessen and Jeff Bezos, Airbnb user EJ's blog entry on the ransacking of her apartment by Airbnb renters went viral, creating a PR nightmare that's turning into a war of words. CNET reports San Francisco police have confirmed that a 19-year-old woman has been arrested in the case, booked on possession of stolen property, methamphetamine, fraud charges, and an outstanding warrant."
Creds ?? Whateva !! No one here is a loon, that much is for sure !! Even our illustrious Cmdr. is no worse than an STD, from a Bangok street whore. No, no. We are all safe. Every fucking last one of us... EXCEPT YOU !! Yeah, YOU, MOTHERFUCKER !! You think I forgot about you ?? WRONG !! Yes, YOU !!
Mostly safe.
I rent a house and the landlord wanted to send round some painters to paint the windows and front door. I wasnt going to be in that day i was at work and didnt want to take a day off just for that. anyway i'm talking to the painter on the phone and he asks me to leave the house keys next door to he can open the front door and paint the frame and the whole door, thats when i my alarm bells started ringing so i said to him how about you leave me the can of paint and i'll finish the inside of the door, so he says no i cant do that. so i left it at that, i'm thinking you dont trust me with a can of paint but you want me to trust you with my house keys?
Let me get this straight. The gimmick is you rent out your place to a total stranger, you don't even meet them face-to-face, and expect them not to run away with all your phat loot ? Moronic. Hotels don't trust them anywhere near as much.
Everyone is focusing on the moronity of renting to, basically, an "AC" because of THIS story. What I wonder is if the renters get to (legally) learn about the owners; are the owners ACs from the point of view of the renters?
I can see four business models where the owner is a crook:
1) House happens to burn down (arson) while renter is present so presumably the owner can not be blamed. Sucks if the renter dies in the fire; then again that makes it more "authentic".
2) House has a "big brother" style camera / videorecording infrastructure, including/especially in the bedrooms and showers. And the owner prefers to rent to attractive young people, perhaps by being on the beach or near a college campus, or maybe kids play equipment in backyard is used as a lure, etc.
3) So, someone is visiting, probably with stuff worth stealing, and someone happens to have their full itinerary, and a spare house key... Would be a shame if their laptop gets stolen... Consider a young woman and someone knows her schedule and knows she is completely alone and also has a key to her bedroom and has some bad intentions...
4) Its actually a grow op / drop house, what if the cops decide to show up that night? Is the visitor part of the gang and laundering their money, or not?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes, Airbnb is a service that doesn't provide any value (why do they exist, again?), but thats not the problem here. Even if they did provide verification of the renter, it would still be stupid to rent out ones apartment exposing private and personal information to some stranger. In this case, the landlord realized that her identity was at risk because the place had been comprehensively trashed. A smarter thief would have simply noted down all the personal data would letting the landlord suspect anything. And because the identity theft using this data could happen many months later, it would be difficult to pin this down to a specific renter.
There is no escaping the fact that landlords like this need a reality check. Maybe the world is filled with people who do and want to do the right thing, but why would you take a risk like this assuming that no bad apples would come in contact with you?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
I have. I worked in student housing. One day, the security guard gave me a call around 11PM on the day all the students were to be out and said he found a door that had been left unlocked by the students when they left. The scene inside was horrifying. Each apartment comes furnished, the living room has a couch, end table, bucket chair, TV stand, and a coffee table. The dining room has a table and four chairs. Each bedroom has a bed, desk, chair, and endtable, for four bedrooms.
Everything save the dining room table, beds, and desks had been implanted in the walls. That's eight chairs, five end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand, made of light steel yet contorted into odd geometric shapes.. The cabinets had been ripped from the walls, the refrigerator left in the middle of the kitchen. The washing machine was full of vomit. The oven had some sort of goo in it as if it had been used to cook crack. The ceiling had unexplainable footprints all over it. Even the storage closet outside was not spared: Its interior had been removed so that the students could slip between their and their neighbor's apartments through the walls.
This was the worst, but certainly not the only one. All said and done, by the end of the summer, we had recorded over $50,000 in damages in a 648 bed complex, with bills to individual students going as high as $5,000 - that's almost the entire school years rent. It's just nuts. These kids are /so/ loaded it's not even funny. One kid reported us to the BBB because we charged him $100 to remove his TV, a gigantic 64" DLP behemoth that worked just fine. What the hell?! Why was it left behind?! And why was I supposed to have to have my maintenance men waste an hour trying to get it out of the third floor apartment?! In another instance, we evicted a kid whose car was worth more than the house I was born in.
In the US, most of the youth are wholly unprepared for life and completely unable to accept any responsibility, and their parents back them up no matter how unruly and uncivilized. I say this as a 25 year old. I had a phone call from a woman one time berating me about her son's damage bill, saying, "Shame on you for ripping off my child! He's just a college student, he doesn't know any better!" My response was that, at the time, I was a college student as well, and I had yet to have a dime removed from my security deposit, even freshman year when I didn't work for the company. I was told that I wasn't allowed to talk to an adult the way I was - telling her that sorry, I might be a "child," but I was the one who wrote the invoices, and no, my "adult" boss wasn't going to make any changes, no matter how wrong or whatever I was.
We had a kid run his car off of our private road, tumble it down a hill and into one of our buildings, prompting an evacuation and us having to house the students in a hotel room. He was drunk, but he managed to get out of the car, take his keys, and run home. On the way home, he slipped and fell. He was never charged with DUI, our insurance had to pay for the damages, AND the insurance paid for his injuries (they didn't want to fight it). Fun times.