Comment on What happened to Airbnb?

• KevonLooney@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  • AirBNB is definitely not the only rental site out there. There are better, more specialized ones.
  • I don’t have any rentals, I just know how much work they are. Can you find anything wrong with my description?
  • Supply and demand is very easy to prove. Just go to any auction. The market clearing price is what someone will pay at the time.

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  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You don’t have to be a monopoly to hold a chokepoint. The industry holds the chokepoint.

    Your description was irrelevant, but also… cry me a fucking river. If you they don’t like doing the work, maybe they could get some sorg if agent to handle the tenants for them, abd maybe the agent could get them to sign long term leases so they can vet them more carefully. Why not do that? Because that alteady exists and makes less money? Okay? Who cares? Jobs are work, here’s Tom with the weather.

    Auctions suck for the most part, that’s why ebay mostly just sells things now. Look at the uproar when Uber does surge pricing. People don’t put up with it. Turns out that outside of a very few artificial situations like an auction, sellers basically just set prices, because unless they’ve specifically opted into an auction environment, consumers don’t put up with it.

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    • jmp242@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sellers can set prices, but for many things there are alternatives and hence more than one seller. Apple sets the iPhone prices, but you can substitute an Android pretty effectively, and there are multiple manufacturers of Android phones at lots of price points. If Apple decided to set the base price of an iPhone to 100k, people would not get mortgages, they’d buy a 500 dollar Android.

      This holds true for lots of things, but housing is distorted by lots of factors. But housing doesn’t disprove supply and demand.

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      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I am not ignorant of the extremely simple story that you will learn in econ 101 - and sadly in more advances courses as well.

        It’s just that it’s only a theory. You should perhaps pay attention to the information you gave, and how you didn’t say, “observation of market behaviour bears out the supply & demand theory”, you just waved vaguely in the direction of a mechanism, with no reference to data.

        If you look at the many studies into the matter where economists accidentally - and sometimes intentionally - did science on this, they found no actual data to support supply and demand as a model of pricing. It simply doesn’t hold true, and yet it’s taught constantly, and if you try to google this, you’ll just find publication after publication talking about the “law” of supply & demand. But it’s not a law, it is simply an assumption.

        When looking at market behaviour and when talking to price setters, there is no data to support the theory, and nobody in the business pays attention to supply & demand. All the models that seem to work share the feature that they are set by the supply chain.

        This article gathers the relevant information and has sources linked: strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflat…

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  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Supply and demand is very easy to prove. Just go to any auction. The market clearing price is what someone will pay at the time.

    Some markets are dominated by the buyers, others by the sellers, others change from time to time.

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