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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/28/how-to-monetise-your-home-ugly-message-netflix-show-airbnb-arwa-mahdawi
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| How to monetise your home – the ugly message of Netflix’s new show | How to monetise your home – the ugly message of Netflix’s new show |
| (3 months later) | |
| Looking for a new Netflix show to watch? Something with a late-capitalist theme, perhaps? Something that leaves you feeling just a little bit empty inside? Well, I have just the series. I recently discovered Stay Here, a property programme with a modern twist. Instead of featuring hard-to-please couples searching for their dream home, Stay Here features a couple of extremely irritating real estate experts, who are helping people optimise their homes for Airbnb. The hosts traverse the US giving homeowners design and marketing tips so they can “succeed in the world of short-term rental”. A sample soundbite: “If you can rebuild it, I can rebrand it.” | Looking for a new Netflix show to watch? Something with a late-capitalist theme, perhaps? Something that leaves you feeling just a little bit empty inside? Well, I have just the series. I recently discovered Stay Here, a property programme with a modern twist. Instead of featuring hard-to-please couples searching for their dream home, Stay Here features a couple of extremely irritating real estate experts, who are helping people optimise their homes for Airbnb. The hosts traverse the US giving homeowners design and marketing tips so they can “succeed in the world of short-term rental”. A sample soundbite: “If you can rebuild it, I can rebrand it.” |
| What’s so wrong with succeeding in the world of short-term rentals, you may ask? If you listen to Airbnb, the short-term rental market is a brilliant way to foster community, revitalise neighbourhoods, help ordinary folk make ends meet and bring about world peace. | What’s so wrong with succeeding in the world of short-term rentals, you may ask? If you listen to Airbnb, the short-term rental market is a brilliant way to foster community, revitalise neighbourhoods, help ordinary folk make ends meet and bring about world peace. |
| Not everyone is of this opinion, of course. In recent years, as Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms such as HomeAway have exploded in popularity, there have been increasing concerns that they are exacerbating the unaffordable housing crisis. Various studies support this idea, and there is also plenty of anecdata: I have a friend who was just about to sign a lease on an apartment in Brooklyn when the landlord decided it would be more profitable to turn it into an Airbnb instead. | Not everyone is of this opinion, of course. In recent years, as Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms such as HomeAway have exploded in popularity, there have been increasing concerns that they are exacerbating the unaffordable housing crisis. Various studies support this idea, and there is also plenty of anecdata: I have a friend who was just about to sign a lease on an apartment in Brooklyn when the landlord decided it would be more profitable to turn it into an Airbnb instead. |
| Don’t expect to find stats about dwindling housing stock or stories about gentrification in Stay Here. The series, which is classified by Netflix as a “feel-good” show, does not delve into the dark side of the short-term rental market. Rather, it is more focused on parroting the Airbnb message that short-term rentals are a lifeline for the struggling middle class. | Don’t expect to find stats about dwindling housing stock or stories about gentrification in Stay Here. The series, which is classified by Netflix as a “feel-good” show, does not delve into the dark side of the short-term rental market. Rather, it is more focused on parroting the Airbnb message that short-term rentals are a lifeline for the struggling middle class. |
| In the first episode, for example, Stay Here’s roving realtors revamp a houseboat owned by a married couple in Seattle. The couple (who don’t live on the boat, but in a non-floating home nearby), are eager to stress that the boat isn’t a luxury they’re milking for as much as possible. “I run a non-profit, she’s a professor,” the husband says. “We’re not real-estate tycoons.” Rather, they say, they are renting it out to help pay their bills. They have a small daughter “whose childcare costs as much as college costs in Seattle”. It is truly heart-warming when untrammelled capitalism can help solve financial problems caused by untrammelled capitalism. | In the first episode, for example, Stay Here’s roving realtors revamp a houseboat owned by a married couple in Seattle. The couple (who don’t live on the boat, but in a non-floating home nearby), are eager to stress that the boat isn’t a luxury they’re milking for as much as possible. “I run a non-profit, she’s a professor,” the husband says. “We’re not real-estate tycoons.” Rather, they say, they are renting it out to help pay their bills. They have a small daughter “whose childcare costs as much as college costs in Seattle”. It is truly heart-warming when untrammelled capitalism can help solve financial problems caused by untrammelled capitalism. |
| There are a few moments in Stay Here, to be fair, when the show hints at the fact that short-term rentals can do long-term harm to communities. In one episode, set in Bed-Stuy, a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn, the homeowner being profiled makes it very clear that he is trying to keep his rental prices down because he wants to ensure the neighbourhood he has lived in for decades remains a “working-class community”. For the most part, however, these glimpses into the more problematic aspects of the sharing economy are rare. The overall moral of the show is “monetise, monetise, monetise”. | There are a few moments in Stay Here, to be fair, when the show hints at the fact that short-term rentals can do long-term harm to communities. In one episode, set in Bed-Stuy, a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn, the homeowner being profiled makes it very clear that he is trying to keep his rental prices down because he wants to ensure the neighbourhood he has lived in for decades remains a “working-class community”. For the most part, however, these glimpses into the more problematic aspects of the sharing economy are rare. The overall moral of the show is “monetise, monetise, monetise”. |
| It’s this obsession with monetisation that bothers me most about Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms. The so-called sharing economy is more accurately the monetise-everything-you-can economy. Your home used to be a place where you lived. It represented security and stability. Increasingly, however, as shows like Stay Here underscore, home is no longer where the heart is; it’s where the monetisation opportunities lie. | It’s this obsession with monetisation that bothers me most about Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms. The so-called sharing economy is more accurately the monetise-everything-you-can economy. Your home used to be a place where you lived. It represented security and stability. Increasingly, however, as shows like Stay Here underscore, home is no longer where the heart is; it’s where the monetisation opportunities lie. |
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