I'm saying this even though I've always enjoyed my short term rentals, which go back to the pre-Airbnb days, when we were finding apartments in Paris and Rome through the classified ads in Harvard Magazine. It just wouldn't be for me.
I don't want anyone nosing around my stuff. Criticizing my taste. Thumbing through my books. Swiping that cute little lemon bowl that cost four bucks at Home Goods. Trying to pry their way into the locked owners closet in an unobvious way. (Of these things, I am guilty of nosing, criticizing, and thumbing, but never of swiping or prying.)
The most interesting things I've come across were in a short term rental on the East Side of NYC. The apartment was owned by an heir to the W.R. Grace fortune. The fortune had petered out over the generations, but this particular scion had inherited a very nice small Degas ballerina painting, which they didn't bother to lock away.
Weirdly, in the same apartment, I went to put my clothes away in the dresser in the bedroom, only to find that the drawers were stuffed with the owner's clothing, or, rather, his wife's. (There was no indication that the dresser was off limits. In every other place I've stayed, there have been drawers that are empty and available.) Anyway, the drawer I opened was stuffed - and I do mean stuffed - with every color imaginable of thongs. Ewwwww. Needless to say, my clothing stayed in my suitcase for the duration.
So while I stay in them on occasion, I don't like what these short term rentals have become. And that's a big business in which some owners have multiple places that they use for transients because they can make more money than they could renting to permanent residents. In many cities, they take scarce apartments off the market for "real people," making it harder for "real people" to live in their own cities. So, a pox on a lot of these short term rentals. I don't blame cities (like NYC) where Airbnb is heavily regulated, limiting the number of days a home may be rented, limiting occupancy, limiting the type of place you can rent (e.g., must be your primary resident - not a secondary home or vacation property).
Anyway, however he does it, Sean Donovan runs an Airbnb in San Francisco (a city that does have significant regulations on Airbnb rentals, even if it's the city where Airbnb was founded and is headquartered).
He thought he was renting to a group of colleagues who needed a place to stay while on business in SF. But things were a bit mysterious from the jump. Donovan's doorbell camera captured the renters moving in large black cases. Then the security system was turned off.
Two days later, Donovan stopped by the house to take out the trash. He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.
When his guests checked out 11 days later, the house was a mess, Donovan claims. Glasses and dishes had been removed from kitchen cabinets and left elsewhere. The dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine were scratched. Dishwasher racks were bent and removed. Wooden furniture was scratched and stained. Bathroom tiles were chipped. A shoe rack and several pairs of shoes were missing from a locked bedroom closet.
"What the hell is going on here?” Donovan recalled thinking. (Source: SF Standard)
What the hell, indeed.
After a bit of detective work, Donovan was pretty sure he had solved the mystery. The renters were, indeed, colleagues. But they worked for the Bot Company, a San Francisco robotics outfit headquartered, oddly enough, on the same street as Airbnb.
The group had, Donovan alleges, taken the place "under false pretenses." They weren't using it as their bed and breakfast They were using it to "conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores." So Donovan's suing them for the relatively modest amount of $12,383.50, which he figures will cover the damages and lost income he would have received if the renters had been honest about wanting to use his place for commercial activity.
“The dishonesty is really what upsets me the most,” he said. “If they had come straight up, ‘Hey, we would like to rent your house for testing of our robot,’ then we could have come to an agreement. But it’s the lying and the misrepresentation that makes me feel violated.”
He's apparently not the only Airbnb host to be violated.
...at least 12 other Airbnb hosts alleging they damaged the property and personal belongings, failed to clean up, exceeded the limit on the number of guests, or violated other house rules during their stays.
But, but, but, the Bot people are geniuses, above and beyond the rest of us.
Our team comes from Tesla, Cruise, OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and many other great companies. (Source: bot.co)They wouldn't even have had to mention that they come from Tesla and other genius hangouts. Just using the .co extension tells us that they're special. They're the cool kids. Using .com as your extension? How pedestrian. How boring. How yesterday. (Okay, they couldn't have used bot.com if they'd wanted to, as it's already taken by a Canadian board of trade. Still...)
And it goes without saying, they're a VC darling (and are currently valued at $2B).
We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who share our belief that robots belong in our everyday lives.
And even if the investors really don't give a hoot if robots belong in our everyday lives, at least they're all hoping that bot.co is a unicorn that will make them all richy rich richer. (Who wants to be a millionaire billionaire trillionaire?)
But for now, the geniuses (or genius-adjacent workers) trashing these short terms rentals sure look to me like a bunch of entitled, ahole, feckless, slobs.
There is no danger, of course, of this startup getting shut down. But geez Louise, pick up after your robots, why don't you? Maybe you can find a better robot - or better yet - an actual human to take care of it for you.
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Image Source: Popular Mechanics
A note on Popular Mechanics. This magazine was founded and, until the early 1960s, was headquartered in Chicago. It's now located in NY. During the 1940s, my mother worked there as an admin/assistant editor. In January 1945, she met my father - who was in the Navy, stationed in downtown Chicago and working out of Navy Pier - on a blind date and they hit it off. They were married in November of that year and moved to my father's home town, Worcester, Massachusetts. So she was something of an intra-country war bride. Anyway, I did get a kick out of finding an image on her magazine's website.
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