The reason they don't do this, I suspect, is because "for sale by dealer" is illegal is a lot of places unless the host registers as a hotel and complies with hotel regulations (which probably excludes their property from being usable).
Well, then, there you go. AirBnB are profiting by violating law.
Good, bad, or otherwise, the owner/dealer distinction clarifies this. Eventually the site simply becomes one-stop shopping for atty's g'l intent on enforcement.
<em>Does Craigslist investigate every item sold to make sure it's not stolen? </em>
No, but they probably should. Pawnshops, in many jurisdictions at least, are supposed to hold things that they buy in case they turn out to be stolen. You can be on the hook for fencing something even if you didn't know it was stolen.
Does the phone company monitor your calls to make sure you aren't scamming the pizza-guy? And can you imagine the delay as you had to go back and forth with Craigslist on what constitutes proof you own a ten-year-old bike, or whatever.
How large should my obligation be, to make sure you aren't breaking the law?
If you think there's a Craigslist seller selling illegal goods, arrest them. Nice and easy.
If you think someone's violating the terms of their lease, tell their landlord.
There's a huge difference between small rates of incidental illicit use, and massive, flagrant violation.
Craigslist does have terms of service, and relies on a user-based flagging method to remove nonconforming content. They claim significant deletions base on this, though my own experience is of massive levels of bad-actor behavior, less of illegal activity and more of rampant spam posting in several sale-by-dealer categories, many lasting for years. Large consequence is that those sections of Craigslist are of exceptionally little value to me. Actually, much of CL doesn't really do much for me these days....
But despite that: the overwhelming majority of activity on CL is at least reasonably above-board.
In the case of AirBnB, the article here notes that 40% of rental volume is from multi-listing members. That is, people not leasing single rooms or properties, but managing multiple properties. Which further discounts professionals who only manage a single property.
That is: a large and visible chunk of AirBnB is not the "come stay at our house" vision the company's propaganda promotes, but is a commercial rentals service not meeting standards of either housing or hotel accomodations.
If that were true, we don't cities enforce this? I hear occasionally about issues with private (individual) tenants violating their leases, or conflicting with local hotel laws, but I never hear about purposeful crack downs on multi-listing power AirBnB users.
Maybe taxpayers are not interested in paying more tax for the enforcement of well-known laws against people who flout them (a few of whom are the very same taxpayers).
