My take on geebee's post is that AirBnB has different effects on different areas, and that it's more of a negative effect that may need to be regulated in "areas that have tourist appeal but are mainly populated with long term residents."

If my kid goes to U of A in Tucson, AZ, and I want to go see his graduation, all the hotels for 20 miles around are going to be booked, and remaining rooms are going to be expensive. If somebody has a spare room at a reasonable price for my wife and me, it seems like a win-win situation for the homeowner and the visitor.

But what if I want to visit Hawaii? The tourism is year-round, and a house or condo could be rented out to cover the mortgage. Now lets shift perspective to the neighbor of that house or condo. Every week, there is a new tourist next door, and maybe some of them pick fruit in the neighborhood and some of them make noise. Sure, it's not a big deal to talk to them, except it happens twice a month, over and over, month after month. So the fruit treess and the noise issues are totally relevant.

I also believe that a good neighborhood increases happiness and home values. You can let kids run around and play (and they actually have kids to play with), you stop and chat with neighbors, and lend each other tools, even help out with stuff. Another problem with the whole just-move-if-you-don't-like-it attitude is where are people going to go on an island with limited space? And why should locals give up their desireable beach-front neighborhood to people who have the capital to buy a house and turn it into a rental?

And so we come to the money issue: in Hawaii, where there are nice neighborhoods in desireable areas, being able to run a house as rental business jacks up the home values. Because if someone can buy a 700K house with a 3K/month mortgage and make 4K/month as a rental, they just got a free house. So the market corrects and the house is now worth 900K (or whatever a 4K mortgage is). So now, everybody's property values go up, and so do their property taxes. So, they can either pay more taxes and live next door to the tourists, or sell their house and move to a less desireable neighborhood (at least not desireable enough to have rentals). Oh, and space is limited and new housing is tight, so there actually isn't anywhere more affordable for them to move to.

Essentially, vacation rentals jack up the local housing market for the benefit of real-estate speculators, often mainlanders looking for a second house, at the expense of local families. Also note that outside of Oahu, tourism is the the major industry, and it doesn't pay enough to buy 700K or 900K houses--so locals are doubly priced out.

At the end of the day, all these problems were identified long ago in Hawaii and certain counties have zoning restrictions on short term rentals. These regulations make renting out on AirBnB (and VRBO, etc.) illegal in certain areas. The problem with AirBnB is that they don't have the tools to let homeowners or renters know about those areas.

In the areas where vacation rentals are legal, AirBnB is more like just another website that got trendy/popular for marketing the properties. It would be very interesting to see the ratio of occasional hosts to "professional" hosts on AirBnB. My guess is they book most of their nights through the established rentals, so it's definitely not in their interest to curtail those. That also means they're less about peer-to-peer sharing and more about encouraging the creation of short-term rental properties to market.