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Rent prices are crazy high, and they don’t seem to be decreasing any time soon. According to Vox, the typical U.S. monthly rent in August went up 12.3 percent over last year. Renters feeling the pinch have often resorted to temporarily renting out extra rooms on services like Airbnb, but that’s usually a violation of your lease. But a new program between Airbnb and landlords seeks to make it actually legal.
Airbnb-friendly apartments is a new program allows you to sign a long-term lease for an apartment and then list it as a short-term rental—whether for a day or 180 days a year—without violating your lease or risking being penalized by your landlord. “As the cost of living continues to rise, renters can use the extra income earned by hosting part-time on Airbnb to contribute to their rent, save for a home, or pay for other living expenses,” said Nathan Blecharzyck, co-founder of Airbnb, in a company statement.
What is an “Airbnb-friendly” apartment?
Finding an apartment that is part of the new program works much like searching Zillow or Apartments.com. You can search for Airbnb-friendly apartments in your city, and trust that if you rent one of them, you will be allowed to list part of or the entire apartment on Airbnb if you so wish.
The program comes at a time when many U.S. cities and states have banned or otherwise restricted short-term rentals on Airbnb. As a result, Airbnb is trying to work with landlords to make the prospect of their tenants renting out rooms more tenable. This includes such recent changes as increasing the damage protection for property owners, banning parties and events, and installing stricter verification processes for guests.
Every building and location included in the program will have its own rules by which tenants must abide, and you’ll still have to follow all local laws that govern short-term rental subleases. But for the most part, as the tenant of an Airbnb-friendly apartment, you can list your place for rent as often as you’d like, provided you don’t exceed the building’s or Airbnb’s maximum number of 180 rentable days per year. You can also expect Airbnb and the buildings participating in the program to take a cut of approximately 20% of your earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
What apartments are eligible for the program?
So far, Airbnb-friendly apartments are available in 29 cities—a total of 175 buildings nationwide. As you search through the list of available Airbnb-friendly apartments, you can click on each to see a breakdown of how much you would earn if you were to list the apartment for rent. For example, a one-bedroom apartment in Eviva On Cherokee in Denver, Colorado goes for $1,770 per month. If you host 7 nights per month, you can earn $851 after fees, resulting in a net monthly rent of $919.
How is this different from leasing with a roommate?
The main difference here is flexibility. The program allows for people who are concerned about making ends meet every month or wish to save some extra money to bring temporary roommates in as they see fit, eliminating the hassles of finding a long-term roommate you are compatible with without sacrificing the extra cash.
Before, if you wanted to list your apartment as a renter, you would have needed permission from your landlord (most leases prohibit the action) or risked doing so under the table. These Airbnb apartments are pre-approved “Airbnb-able” apartments. However, it’s worth considering that just because you can list your place, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to reliably find temporary tenants,—so the extra income is hardly guaranteed.
