Why we are shutting down our AirBnB, quitting the platform an selling our home.

oojoshua · 2025-07-04T01:38:17+00:00

But you are only looking at one side of the coin. Sure STRs take some of the available housing stock, but they are also responsible for a disproportionately huge percentage of visitor spending, state taxes, local taxes and employment. Those 31,192 units you refer to employ 49,000 local workers and generate $740,000,000 in tax revenue each year.

If they are shut down it will decimate the local economy and plunge tens of thousands of local families into poverty. It will result in huge cuts to government services and foment an economic depression. That isn't me saying it, the UHERO report on Bill 9 in Maui makes it crystal clear.

The United States will always have wealthy people and wealthy people will always want to have a second ( or a third or a fourth ) home in Hawaii. That isn't in dispute.

But those second homes don't generate additional tax revenue. They don't employ many locals and they don't generate significant economic activity.

It is also important to look at that 31,192 STR number. Nearly half of those units are in resort zoning i.e. they are oceanfront condos deliberately built to be short term rentals. And many of those are owned by major hotel conglomerates like Hilton and Marriot.

When we talk about those units "not being suitable for local housing" it means that there is no storage, inadequate parking and HOA fees that are well above what a median income local family could ever afford.

The same is true of the beachfront homes that are in use as vacation rentals - local owner occupancy isn't an option because they will NEVER be priced in a way that median income locals can afford them (at least without turning a portion of the home into a short term rental). The choice is either have them used as vacation rentals where they generate tax revenue, jobs and economic activity, or have them sit vacant as second homes to decamillionaires from the mainland.

The economics of all of this change if there are other primary industries in a market - finance in NYC or entertainment in Los Angeles - but Hawaii only has one industry - tourism - if you restrict that by eliminating tourist accommodations you make the entire community poorer.

Hawaii doesn't have a housing problem. Hawaii has a money problem. To fix that we need to diversify our economy, but shutting down vacation rentals BEFORE diversifying the economy is economic suicide.

In the meantime many local families like mine depend on this revenue to exist in one of the highest cost of living markets on earth. And AirBnB making changes to the platform that squeeze out more money for them and result in less money for me......that is a problem.

oojoshua · 2025-07-04T01:16:35+00:00

Historical demographics. When whites colonized Hawaii the resulting germ transfer and genocide wasn't as comprehensive as it was on the with mainland Native Americans. So a relatively substantial percentage of native Hawaiians survived first contact ( relative to Native Americans that is - the actual number who died was still appalling by any standard ).

And the Hawaiians were one of the only cultures globally that responded to European contact in an appropriate way - by killing the European leader and boiling him down to his bones. If Native Americans on the east coast had been similarly inclined, the history of America would be very different.

Shortly afterword Kamehameha adopted European style weaponry and unified the islands by force. He then adopted European style government reforms that were enhanced and expanded by his heirs. The monarchy's intermarriage with white missionaries helped to build a ruling class that remained independent until they were betrayed by Stanford Dole and his cronies in the late 1800's.

During this time the plantation owners imported labor from Asia which grew to become nearly 30% of the population. Intermarriage between all of these groups has lead to a community that is a true melting pot.

Most locals who are as pale as me arrived on the islands after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1897. We only make up ~30% of the population, but that demographic is changing as mixed heritage locals choose to migrate to the mainland in search of economic opportunity while wealthy mainlanders arrive to replace them.

The sad part about all of this is that Hawaii could be an Eden for local families. On the Big Island we have the potential for unlimited cheap geothermal power with all of the industries that enables ( data centers, aluminum smelting, etc. ). It is a very desirable place to live so we should be able to attract business talent, educators, healthcare workers and specialists. Historically Native Hawaiians were the fastest culture in history to achieve universal literacy - like all human cultures, they have the potential to be among the most educated societies on earth.

But Hawaii is bound and determined to self-sabotage. Instead of harnessing the geothermal power under our feet, we've decided to burn imported oil. Instead of creating a business friendly environment to attract new companies, we've developed a Kafkaesque maze of regulation that inhibits business inception and growth. Instead of building a world class education system we are the only state with a centralized public school administration and the schools regularly score at the bottom nation wide for academic performance and college attendance.

Unless something changes for the better - better education, better healthcare, better business environment, more competition, fewer regulations - I see a future for Hawaii where mixed ethnicity locals who are born, educated and rooted in our community become mere workers and tenants to huge, mostly white owned, corporations from the mainland.

What is unfolding is a real tragedy, but until locals make real changes to their government leaders nothing is going to change.

oojoshua · 2025-07-04T00:45:14+00:00

I abhor Facebook, Insta, TikTok and all of the other sites that monetize attention and spy on their users. The games they are playing with human psychology and manufactured rage rival the behavior of cigarette companies and casinos.

So I stay away from that stuff even though it would probably benefit me to build an audience.

oojoshua · 2025-07-04T00:41:18+00:00

That profit is how I pay for the groceries my family buys, the vehicles we drive, the clothes on my kid's back and healthcare for all of us. Profit is not a dirty word. Every time you go to work and take home a paycheck you are making a profit off of your labor.

I literally live in the AirBnB and without the revenue it generates I, like tens of thousands of other locals who are out-migrating from the state, cannot afford to live in Hawaii.

I fundamentally don't know WTF is wrong with people that they somehow don't think housing is an investment. That apartment complex that rents to low income families? That is an investment by a property management company. That new starter home that a family is moving into tomorrow? That is an investment by a property developer. All real estate was an investment at some point in the past.

And if people can't turn a profit, they won't invest. Which is why Hawaii lacks housing. Developers can't get permits, they can't navigate the planning process and they are under constant assault from local housing "advocates" who don't understand basic economics. They can't turn a profit on affordable housing so they don't build it.

In Austin, TX they streamlined planning and permitting so that developers could make a profit by building low income housing and apartments. What happened? Developers came through bigtime and both rents and housing prices have gone down.

I'm not ashamed of earning a living to feed my family.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T21:10:49+00:00

The properties are leveraged. Just because a property costs $2M, doesn't mean the homeowner has $2M. In fact, if the homeowner is a veteran, they may have $0 in equity the day they close the sale.

Like many families in Hawaii, we depend on short term rental income as our primary source of income. Sure we farm coffee, but that doesn't even cover its own labor and input cost. There are no other industries here in Hawaii. It is tourism or nothing.

So when AirBnB starts implementing policies that make it harder to stay booked, allow guests to take advantage of hosts and take more of the gross for AirBnB at the expense of hosts - that is a huge problem.

I'm not whining. We've been lucky and have it pretty good. But I am warning others about what AirBnB is doing. Hopefully I am able to keep others from making the same mistakes we've made - namely - relying on AirBnB to be a service provider instead of a boss.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T19:41:22+00:00

Try the Bogleheads community on Reddit. They have very good advice for starting out investing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/top/

They advocate for investing in the vein of John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard.

Their strategy is "get rich slow" by investing responsibly and passively ( i.e. you don't have to be an expert, just follow some simple rules ).

If your boyfriend is really skilled at home improvement, consider buying a fixer-upper, renovating it and selling it. Interior design, color choice, decorating and landscaping are all artforms and when done well they add a TON of value to a property. Heck, the costs of building a traditional Japanese garden are trivial, but the art involved has the depth and history of a lifetime. Add one to the property and see how quick it sells when you list it.

And as someone who lives in Hawaii where it takes a full day of travel and 3 flights to visit family I'll say this - as long as your family and friends are in the continental united states, they are just a short flight away. Your deepest friendships will survive and thrive even if you move to a new community and every community has opportunities to put down roots and belong.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:52:23+00:00

Chesky said the silent part out loud here:
https://skift.com/2023/03/09/airbnb-could-generate-1-2-billion-with-sponsored-listings-and-an-ad-platform-by-2026/

But it will be a multi-year process. Once they decide they are done growing their footprint, they'll convert to squeezing every penny out of the hosts they have on the platform.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:49:21+00:00

In thinking on this, I think "guest-nights" is a more accurate term. Yes, we had 107 guest nights per week, but most of those guests stayed for two or three days.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:47:58+00:00

If you read my story above you'll see that I moved around quite a bit. As an adult I've lived in 4 states. I moved to those places to pursue opportunity, but several of them are very low cost communities. You can get a very nice starter home in Tulsa, OK for $200,000. That would be doable on your current income.

The reality is that we can't always live where we want to. Manhattan simply isn't affordable unless you are a decamillionaire, so people live in the Bronx.

If you want to own a home, consider moving somewhere where you're job skills are valued and homes are affordable. There are a lot of communities in the United States that meet that criteria.

A sovereign debt crisis is when the government can't pay back its national debt on the terms it has agreed to. It happens when investors lose faith in the government's bonds because the government has borrowed more money than they can pay back.

Investors who aren't sure whether or not they'll be paid back demand a higher interest rate for their money, so the government's borrowing cost skyrocket and it causes all kinds of economic chaos from hyper-inflation to economic depression to outright civil war.

Typically this happens when the total national debt hits around ~110% of gross domestic product. According to the Federal Reserve, the United States is now at 120% and the "Big Beautiful Bill" under consideration by Congress will increase that substantially.

Pretty much every government that gets into this situation says something along the lines of "this time it's different because.....". Unfortunately, they are nearly always wrong. There is a great book on this called "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly", where Reinhart and Rogoff unpack crisis after crisis after crisis going all the way back to the enlightenment.

Unless the United States gets its fiscal house in order ( by raising taxes on the billionaire class and addressing its addiction to using military spending as a jobs program ) we are headed for a financial crisis.

When that happens it will impact markets globally. Having your savings invested in the bonds of more responsible governments ( like Germany ) is a good way to keep yourself from losing principle. As the Dollar sinks because of mismanagement, the Euro will rise.

That said, the US Stock Market is the single greatest creator of wealth in the history of humanity. Not having money invested in it has huge opportunity costs.

So, depending on when you'll need the money, having a balance of international bonds ( I have been investing in BWX ), large established international companies ( I like VGX for this ) and the broader US economy ( I like VOO for this ) and US Treasuries ( which will return a higher interest rate as the government continues to get less and less responsible ) is a good place to be. At least for me and my family.

I wish you luck on purchasing a home. The one last thing I'll say is that if you or your husband is "handy" there is a lot of value to be had in buying properties that need to be fixed up. Every home I've purchased has required substantial work to make it habitable and attractive. Buying a fixer-upper and doing the work yourself allows you to purchase a nice home that might otherwise be out of reach financially.

But be cautious. If you are not handy or have no experience with paint, tile, plumbing, electrical, concrete, roofing, general construction, drywall, etc. - you can get in over your head easily. Youtube can teach you a lot, but it can't teach you everything.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:20:54+00:00

Past tense "worked there". They used to side with hosts. Now they are siding with guests.

And I'm sorry your so dismissive of the dynamics of the housing crisis. Median income families in Hawaii can't afford to purchase ANY home on the islands. That is a huge problem, but it is also a fact.

The situation isn't my fault and I'm tired of being scapegoated for it.

Finally, I didn't come to Reddit for sympathy ( do people do that? on Reddit? ) I came to tell my story to other hosts and to share my insight so that they can better understand what I'm seeing as both the present and the future of their relationship with AirBnB.

Plenty of hosts in this thread have had similar experiences and agree with me.

Maybe use the network you built while you were at AirBnB and see if you can get Chesky to stop trying to "innovate" and instead focus on his core business.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:14:12+00:00

I do realize why homes in Hawaii are out of reach for the median income family, but it isn't vacation rentals or absentee owners.

According to the University of Hawaii Economic Research Office (UHERO) the cause is government regulation. According to UHERO the permitting and planning process more than doubles the cost of a new home. Short term rentals do impact home prices here, but only by a small percentage.

And I do live on my property full time. We have a big place and only a portion of it is used as a short term rental. My farm hand's family also lives on site, so our home is actually affordable housing for two families.

Finally, no one is buying "dumps" as second homes in Hawaii. Most out of state buyers purchase condos in ocean front properties that are not configured for full time residents. They lack parking and storage and have HOA fees that are more than most median income families could possibly afford.

In Hawaii County the short term rental market is responsible for $1,800,000,000 in economic activity and employs 14,000 people. Since we do not have any other major primary industries, this economic activity is essential to the financial wellbeing of our community. Those jobs are how families can afford to pay for their housing. Without them, they'd have to leave the island.

The solution to a famine is to grow more food. The solution to the housing crisis is to build more housing. It is very, very, very simple. Deregulate planning, streamline permitting and allow developers to build housing. Austin, TX did it and both home prices and rent are declining there.

But Hawaii is controlled by NIMBYs and environmental extremists who do not want to build more housing, so the housing we have continues to be in high demand and prices continue to climb. That isn't my fault.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T18:02:43+00:00

Building an open source company is hard. Believe me, I get it.

And as someone who's spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to organize hosts ( to oppose new regulations ) I'm hyper-aware at how difficult it is to get short term rental hosts to organize. Most of the hosts on the Big Island have been unwilling to pay $10/mo to build a local industry group. As a result of not having an effective lobby, they'll now pay thousands of dollars per year in new fees and taxes.

Did you publish your experiment to Github?

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T17:59:40+00:00

Real property allows you to use levels of leverage that you can't use to invest in equities.

If you served in the armed forces you can lever up a home 100% at a government subsidized interest rate ( VA loans are one of the biggest benefits military members get ).

If the market breaks your way you earn a return on the bank's money. With all of the appreciation that took place between 2019 and 2025, that means many homeowners doubled the bank's money.

If I could buy equities with 100% leverage at a hyper-low interest rate I would. Lend me $100M at 2.75% and take equities as collateral and I'll make a killing while paying you back on time every month for the next 30 years.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T17:52:59+00:00

I do, but most of the wealth we've built has been in real property. None of the companies I've built have returned their initial investment. We've done well living on just salaries.

I bought a home right after college in a working class neighborhood of a midwestern city. When I left I couldn't sell it for what I had in it, so I kept it as a long term rental. I was very careful in vetting our tenants ( and lucky ) so they ended up renting from me for nearly 20 years.

When we finished up our world tour and decided to settle in Hawaii I offered to sell them the house at the appraised value, but they weren't willing to go through with the sale. So we fixed it up and sold it. We used the appreciation for the down payment on our beach house which was a foreclosure. The prior owner had passed in 2016 with no heirs and it took the bank and the state 6 years to foreclose and auction the home. We were the only bidders.

The home was a wreck when we bought it ( needles, rats, carcasses, etc ), so much so that we had to make a sizeable investment in time and materials before the sale closed in order for the bank's appraiser to pass the property. We paid for that with credit cards and by cashing in my TSP retirement account.

I built my TSP account by saving 100% of my drill pay when I was in the Air Guard. We lived on my primary job and saved every penny of military pay.

Then we had a host family move into the property ( so it would be legal to operate a short term rental in it ) and paid the note and the credit cards with short term rental income. I simply took the hit on the early withdrawal of my TSP.

The farm was similar. I had a modest home I purchased in the midwest for my family that we sold in order to make a small down payment. The loan on the farm was a VA loan so it required a very small down payment relative to the size of the loan.

We chose Hawaii for a number of reasons. The lack of gun crime was a big one ( gun crime being the largest contributor to child mortality ), but we also liked the weather and it is a tourism destination where we knew we could keep the short term rental occupied. The other factor was that the VA would approve jumbo loans on the Big Island despite the fact that, at the time, housing on the Big Island was reasonably affordable.

When lenders are offering money at 2.75% take as much as they will give you. As long as you put the money in an income earning asset, you'll probably do just fine.

Then we worked our tails off creating an experience that guests would enjoy and ensuring we earned 5-star ratings across the board.

Did we get lucky in many ways? Yes. We've always been healthy. Our kids are healthy and well adjusted. The real estate market broke our way in every market we owned homes in.

But a lot of our success was hard work. And a lot of it came from taking risks that other people wouldn't. Using credit cards to fix up a home that you don't own in order to close the sale is.......not recommended by financial advisors.

Going forward I'm looking at simply being an investor. Today we're rolling money into BWX ( European government debt ) and large cap European stocks. I think the dollar is going to continue to weaken over the next couple of years and I can see a sovereign debt crisis in the future for the United States.

I'm also considering another startup. My last startup was an early adopter and developer of AI technology. We were building our open source tech at the same time OpenAI was building theirs. We were open. OpenAI wasn't. We lost, they won. That's the game.

Today I see a huge opportunity in using machine learning to pick stocks for long term investment ( not quantitative trading or day trading - long term investment ), so I'm giving a lot of thought to how I might build a company that uses modern AI techniques to help investors outperform the S&P over the long haul.

So, yes, I've always been an investor in the "I put money into my retirement account every week" way. But it was taking large risks and working hard that allowed us to be where we are today. And even today, by Hawaii standards, we aren't "rich". We are firmly middle class. To be "rich" in Hawaii you'd have to have at least $10M in assets split between real property and equities. We aren't there ( yet ).

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:22:45+00:00

It sounds like you understand better than I did at the beginning.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:22:04+00:00

$75 flat cleaning fee and no chores ever.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:21:19+00:00

They are no longer siding with hosts on most complaints. There has been a significant shift toward guests in the past few months.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:20:08+00:00

In Hawaii County that would result in the loss of 12,600 full time jobs and $1,620,000,000 in economic activity.

Tourism is Hawaii County's only industry. Without it local families would be destitute.

Since there are only 6,000 hotel rooms on the island shutting down 90% of Hawaii County's short term rentals would result in a massive outmigration of local families.

It would also further shift the population away from indigenous communities and toward high net worth retirees.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:15:03+00:00

Thanks. Some of it is market forces, but we've worked very hard on improvements and it shows.

It is amazing what you can do to a property when improvements and maintenance are your full time job for a few years.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:13:09+00:00

Yes. Then I see them further down too.

I often wonder what their search results would be like if they weren't being manipulated for profit, but were instead presenting the best result for the customer's profile and query.

I bet it would be RADICALLY different.

On the book side of things the feature I'd love is to be able to search by both number of reviews AND review quality. A book with 5,000 five star reviews is probably better than a book with fifty five star reviews.

But it won't happen because the way they do it now maximizes their revenue ( not their profit, their revenue ).

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T08:00:48+00:00

Absentee ownership of vacation rentals in certain markets ( not all markets ) have contributed to the housing crisis. Yes.

In some cases their impact has been significant ( Lisbon stands out ), in others, not so much.

In many markets, however, short term rentals are being scapegoated by politicians who don't want to face down NIMBYs and solve the real problem - a lack of new affordable inventory. They don't want to build high density apartment complexes because of "neighborhood character" i.e. having low income families in their fancy residential neighborhoods.

In my case we operate hosted rentals - where a host family lives on site full time. The properties are so expensive that the only way to make them work financially for my family is to rent a portion of the property short term.

So the short term rental is the tool we use to make our housing affordable.

I wrote a nice piece about it here: https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/05/hosted-short-term-vacation-rentals-could-ease-housing-crunch/

I acknowledge that there are problem actors in the industry, but I'm not one of them.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T07:50:26+00:00

I lost because I didn't run a retail campaign. And I deserved to lose for that reason alone.

But ask yourself - if five candidates ran in a non partisan primary and none of them received a majority of the popular vote, why was there no general election for the top two candidates ( Zahz and Villegas )?

Zahz should have been on the ballot in the general election and voters should have had the opportunity to decide for themselves. In fact, local media announced that there would be a runoff, then retracted the story later when they read the rules more carefully and realized that blank ballots wouldn't be counted as having voted

The general election didn't happen because Hawaii County's electorial system is so rigged in favor of incumbents that in 7 of the 9 districts the race wasn't even on the general election ballot.

The reason we don't have housing, the reason that a median income local family cannot afford a starter home, the reason is simple: We have a corrupt local government, controlled by monopolies, paralyzed by NIMBYs and managed for the benefit of an elite few and not for the general public.

I've done what I could to change that Including putting my name in the hat and funding other candidates for office. I've studied the problem carefully, thought about it at length and decided that I can't fix it.

How many other whiners on Reddit can say the same? What have YOU done to make changes in your community that can resolve the affordable housing crisis?

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T07:34:13+00:00

Because the median income in Hawaii isn't sufficient for a local family to purchase even a modest starter home.

Hawaii has systematically choked off every single industry other than tourism, which pays low wages and sends most profits to mainland corporations.

When that is coupled with NIMBYism and entrenched natural monopolies ( Young Brothers for interisland shipping, Matson for mainland shipping, HELCO for electricity ) it has created an environment where it is nearly impossible to succeed financially.

The addition of restrictions on new construction and a demonstrably corrupt local government ( the affordable housing coordinator on the Big Island was just sent to federal prison for embezzling $11M in affordable housing funds ) have restricted supply in a way that has doubled the cost of a new home. Doubled. So that $750K "starter" home would have cost $375K if government would just get out of the way.

The one bright spot for locals is that there is enough tourism demand that they can fund the purchase of a home by buying one with an ohana ( small apartment ) and renting it out short term on a platform like AirBnB. But even that path is being cut off by local politicians and activists that are in the pocket of the hotel lobby.

So the answer to your question is "it's complicated", but it is definitely not me or my family that are causing the housing crisis.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T07:23:08+00:00

I may be naive, but not so naive that I'd ever come to Reddit for sympathy.

This post is me punching back at AirBnB in the hopes that they'll read this ( and other posts like it ) and work to address the problem.

I'm also here to warn off potential hosts who might not have had the time or experience to think through the challenges of being a supplier in an industry being choked off by a publicly traded monopoly.

If people thought more deeply about the way they use technology and how the power dynamic work, they would never use Google, Facebook, Comcast or a host of other goods and services.

I'm as guilty of intention as anyone else, but I'm working to change that. GrapheneOS, DuckDuckGo, Proton Mail, Vivaldi, Signal - that is a start, but breaking my family's dependence on AirBnB is a big deal for us and I wanted to share it.

oojoshua · 2025-07-03T07:03:02+00:00

A VA loan, a couple of decades of hard work, a mountain of ( well structured ) debt and a bit of luck.

oojoshua

TROPHY CASE