Breaking point wasn’t the furniture-destroying sex at 3am in the room directly above ours nor the smartphone alarm vibrating into their floor/our ceiling at 5am – instead it was the frustration that our upstairs neighbour and part-time Airbnb host didn’t bother to reply to our text whingeing about the ordeal.
Welcome to life with an Airbnb as a neighbour – and we’re not the only ones sending passive aggressive text messages. So widespread is the problem that in March, Airbnb introduced a snitching tool to help neighbours complain to the company about their host neighbours.
It’s not getting many complaints. As of September, Airbnb was seeing about one in 18,000 guest arrivals “result in contact with us through the neighbour tool”, a spokesperson told WIRED. There are about 120,000 listings in the UK. “The overwhelming majority of Airbnb hosts and guests are good neighbours and respectful travellers, so complaints and issues are incredibly rare.
“We want to do everything we can to help our community members be good neighbours in the communities our hosts call home. This tool will help achieve that goal."
We didn’t figure out that Airbnb was the source of our upstairs neighbour’s erratic behaviour until a pair of Australian tourists flooded our bathroom. Suddenly the months of random people struggling with the triple-lock front door made sense.
Read more: Airbnb to let neighbours complain about noisy guests
There are bigger complaints against Airbnb than driving a wedge between neighbours – such as the legal, tax and gentrification issues, alongside accusations of discrimination – and as annoying as it may be to live next to a sometimes-hotel, there are worse characteristics to have in neighbours than a limited stay. That said, I’ve had no problems living next to drug dealers (they were friendly), or sharing a landing with an apparent prostitute (she and her clients were awfully quiet), but have nothing but complaints living under an Airbnb – and I’m not the only one. I’ve spoken to a dozen suffering neighbours of Airbnb hosts, and most agree that it’s not the noise so much as the lack of communication.
Not all neighbours will mind living next to an Airbnb, but those I spoke to had a common refrain: they weren’t consulted by their neighbour, or even alerted; they’re irritated by noise complaints, from 5am parties to visitors endlessly fiddling with door locks that longer-term residents would have learned by now; and many simply feel unsafe with the constant coming and going of strangers.
Lisa in Boston, US says she was fine with an Airbnb neighbour at first. “There are advantages to having only temporary neighbours: no long-lasting problems, no potential for ongoing feuds, no complaints about my dogs barking or anything like that,” she says. “Any problems that came with individual guests also left with individual guests.”
But the shine wore off after a few months. “Then I started to notice the toll the Airbnb use was having on us, on the house, and on the neighbourhood,” she explains. That included a constant stream of strangers leaving her and her boyfriend feeling “paranoid” and turning into curtain twitchers, as well as noise, rubbish left behind, and what she dubs “resource conflicts”. “My unit shares plumbing and electricity with one of the units, so we frequently run into problems there – if someone flushes a toilet while I'm in the shower, for instance, I'm suddenly scalded,” Lisa continues.
Access is a problem. The first time you unlock your front door, you may have to fiddle with it. But a constant stream of guests means the frequent jangle of keys, jiggling of an unrelenting lock, and frustrated cursing at the unopenable door. Glenn from Melbourne, Australia explains his neighbouring Airbnb host didn’t note the unit number on his listing. “The lady in unit one would get buzzed all the time by people who turn up and don’t know which flat to go in,” he says. “Sometimes in the middle of the night.” And once they got in, they’d party until 5am – in the middle of the week.
Patricia from Montreal, Canada called the police on one party – and was rewarded with threats from the Airbnb guests. “All those party-goers know where we live and they know it was us who called the authorities,” she says. “What's to stop them from vandalising our place or attacking us?”
It isn’t just Airbnb that can land you with noisy, disruptive neighbours of course, and it goes both ways, as guests at our neighbour’s flat have ironically mentioned the noise from us in their review. “Would some of these problems still exist with permanent residents who weren't Airbnb guests? Absolutely,” says Lisa. “But at least with permanent residents, I could address the challenges. With constant guests, I have to either repeat the same requests over and over, or just shrug and hope they're leaving soon. The problems may not last long, but they recur and recur and recur. It gets old.”
Read more: Airbnb has taken on hotels, now it's gunning for the whole travel industry with Trips
When it gets too old, neighbours turn to Airbnb to help, though they don’t always get it. Before the launch of the neighbour reporting tool, Allison from Washington, US filed complaints with the host, their landlord and Airbnb itself. “We tried contacting Airbnb at least a dozen times and obviously it didn’t matter to them,” she says. (Airbnb has asked to be put into contact with each of the people we interviewed to help solve any lingering issues.)
A few of the neighbours interviewed now refuse to use Airbnb as a traveller because of their experience, with one interviewee saying: “I don't want to be part of the problem”. I’m a hypocrite and still book accommodation through the site, as it allows me to avoid staying in tourist-prone areas – an idea that clearly appeals, as the site is now shifting into local-run tours with its new service Trips.
“The appeal of Airbnb for tourists is the ability to ‘live like a local,’ by gaining access to the everyday ‘back regions’ of cities,” notes Jacqui Alexander, a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne. “That means bringing tourists and locals in closer proximity, and challenging the idea of ‘tourism-specific’ infrastructure (hotels, dedicated transport etc). Cultural exchange is a good thing, and peer-to-peer sharing of spare rooms or granny flats can facilitate that while also helping to supplement household income.”
That works best when hosts let their own flat when they’re away on holiday or empty-nesters with a spare bedroom, rather than houses that sit empty when they don’t have an Airbnb booking, as the former makes effective use of housing stock, while the latter has the reverse effect, she explains. “Repurposing residential infrastructure specifically for Airbnb is generally undesirable in cities because this reduces available housing stock for residents, tends to minimise interaction between tourists and locals, and sits in direct competition with the regulated hotel industry,” says Alexander. In other words, the best way for Airbnb to operate is with hosts letting out their flat now and then, as my own neighbour does, rather than have a home dedicated to short-term lettings without longer-term residents.
Either way, Airbnb hosts can set rules to help avoid such complaints, according to Veronica Tribolati, the founder of Airbnb management firm HelloGuest, which does the dirty work of handing out keys to guests, cleaning flats between visitors, and so on. Her firm has a screening policy and strict house rules in writing in each let flat to “avoid any problems with the neighbourhood”, which she says has helped avoid most problems aside from the odd noise complaint.
Even a professionally managed Airbnb can disrupt the neighbours. “The one that will always be in my mind is when a guest managed to lock himself out from the building and he tried to jump from the outdoor stairs to the flat window,” says Triolati. “Unfortunately, he missed the window rail and managed to land in the neighbour’s basement garden, and all this in front of the owner of the basement.” That’s one way to meet the neighbours.
Read more: The people making the on-demand economy work
One common refrain from neighbours of hosts was they wish they had simply been told when the place was being rented out on the site. If you are a host, don’t wait until your neighbours are pissed off or guests are landing in their gardens – give them a heads up before there are problems, something Airbnb itself advises.
After all, it’s a wise move to have someone on your street looking out for your place when you’ve rented it to a stranger. Patricia wishes she could have called her neighbour about the out of control party rather than the police. “We never knew [they were using Airbnb],” she says. “If we had, we could have asked for their phone number and informed them as soon as the party was out of control... People left with the washing machine for crying out loud! This whole mess could have been avoided if the neighbours had come clean.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
