In 2012 — around the same time as this blog got underway — I started being an AirBnB host.
Here I was at the time, a full-grown adult, having to have roommates to meet the housing expenses. And roommates in Montreal were seriously a crapshoot when the rents were still relatively cheap (it may be a little better, now that they’re not). The only adults who didn’t opt to live alone were those who couldn’t afford to live alone, or who wanted a ready-to-use place where responsibilities were assumed by the person living there. In both cases, you get either transient or difficult roommates. And as you’re not allowed to get first-and-last-month’s rent or a security deposit (I know, right? Seriously, a terrible law), you have no indemnification against the worst roommates. There’s your incentive to live alone.
Without a supporting culture that roommates are base-level responsible and considerate, over twenty years of cohabiting, I’ve had a lot of crappy roommates. I’m not talking of slightly different lifestyles and incompatible concepts of cleanliness. Those frustrations are fairly common. It’s more like, “Here’s are a situation in which you can maximize the chaos! you don’t owe anyone ANYthing!”
Roommates who did stuff like “borrow,” lose, and break things they didn’t replace or repair; who had friends mooching off the common space and supplies and utility bills; who ran up bills without paying them; who never did the housework; who left before their lease was up without sufficient notice or covering the rent; who left by installing a stranger [in my home!] who ended up skipping out anyway. And then there are some who made things impossible with their behaviour, so that they simply had to go. Holy mackerel, do I have stories! A bad rental/roommate culture will tend to proliferate those.
I really needed to stop having roommates without having to sell the house. I still had a significant mortgage, as well as all the other “rent is due” expenses (insurance, property taxes, utilities, etc.). The first mortgage I’d had was at 4.75%. The bank officer who set it up screwed me over by not setting up the line of credit as home-equity, so it was a consumer line of credit at 7%! (When you first get a mortgage, insist that you get a HELOC. If you leave it to later to convert it to a HELOC, the bank penalizes you by making you qualify all over again—and conditions may not be so favourable as when you first qualify.) So off to work I went, but also…
AirBnB to the rescue
After hearing about that last terrible roommate, a friend told me about AirBnB. I’d already been doing CouchSurfing, letting travellers stay here for a day or two as a pay-it-back for having done so myself. It was a lot of fun. Not perfect, because people are weird, but people are mostly good, especially short-term while travelling.
So AirBnB made perfect sense to me, to be able to have temporary guests over the portion of the year when people visit Montreal. This would offset the living expenses, and share the resources I was already using, and be a bit of a social boost. I had an extra room, even two extra rooms for whenever a family or trio of friends wanted to stay. And so that’s how I started.
It was with great excitement that AirBnb sent a professional photographer to take pics for the AirBnB listing. Thus began my critical-eye period for figuring out home decoration. Here’s what the house looked like back then (compare to more modern blog posts where you can!):
Learning how to be a host
And so began a fairly non-intensive course in how to be a good host. It was non-intensive because when AirBnB first started, the people who used it understood that they were staying with local people in their own homes, at the quality of life that those people enjoyed, not staying at a “cheap boutique hotel.” So aside from the guests who let their teenage daughter sleep in my bed while I was away (not the room I set up for her), or the other guests who used every towel in the house (…a weird way to take advantage?), it was very much an authentic host-guest type of interaction.
I even achieved a low-key level of fame (a private kind, without public notoriety) for my hosting proficiency and the appearance of my home:
Whole-house renting misadventures
The first two years I did it, I tried renting out my whole house for a limited number of long weekends. Almost right away, I ran into the predictable (but thankfully not constant) problem of someone trying to bargain me down in price and rent the whole house off-platform (that is, without any fees or guarantees: a really bad idea). I wavered on the first (also a really bad idea: it’s fairly common knowledge that if a guest tries to negotiate on price, they’re going to be horrible guests!) but declined on the second. But as the date of their booking approached, I became increasingly alarmed at how little information they shared through their profile on AirBnb, ignoring policy and my repeated requests for their information. Finally I told them they needed to upload their ID, photo, and full name and location, or else find somewhere else to go. Of course they cancelled. This was a good lesson to learn. Someone else then booked a room, so I saved myself the trouble of needing to go elsewhere, and earned some money despite the cancelled booking.
I rented the whole house a few more times to families (notably for a wedding) and some friend groups without any trouble at all, but after an Osheaga (music fest) weekend with some party-people from Toronto1, I stopped completely. The stories in the news of people having nightmare guests ruining their homes, the neighbours dealing with horrible noise, trash, and trashy behaviour… There are people to whom this risk would be inconceivable. When these Toronto guests first arrived, I was a little concerned, so I stayed in their company under the premise of needing to take care of a few more things before leaving them to it (the premise was true, but also a ploy: if you get to know someone a little, you’re less likely to casually harm them – so getting to know me might curb some misbehaviour). I stayed in communication with them over the weekend, and I was relieved that they left on time.
But of course they flouted my house rules (a maximum number of guests; probably between 10 and 20 people stayed here!). Usually as soon as a guest breaks a house rule, the booking is cancelled, but when the rule is discovered after the fact…what then? AirBnB would not forfeit their damage deposit as they should have, but the guests left a huge mess, damaged a few things, and lost a key. The woman was rude about having to square up the damages, which frankly were more of a nuisance than an actual cost, but I considered myself lucky. The neighbours didn’t complain about the party guests, and as for the trouble they caused me, well, I did get a semi-stocked bar of half-bottles and a nearly-full case of Corona Extra out of it. Plus: just don’t do this, you got lucky this time.
Shared accomodation misadventures
It’s always the memorably uncouth guests that one is liable to mention, and that’s no exception here, but really, most people are good people! Basically my booking and pricing policies were always geared to attract peers. One way to assure that you get what you want is put some personality into your own profile, and describe the house rules and house vibe, so that people who don’t like your style won’t book. The biggest concern I had was simply that they would be respectful. (Anyone walking into someone’s home under the impression that a transaction buys superiority and the host is a servant or a contemptible bourgeois…is very poorly raised.)
Early on, I had an Italian family who spoke neither French nor English, but we had a wonderful time playing charades to communicate (this before Google Translate got any good). I had a guest from South Africa, billeted here for a conference, who I’m still in touch with to this day. A great number of people from France have stayed here; the French can almost universally be counted on to be good guests, they just get it. And my spoken French is much, much better for it. I’ve had people from many different walks of life — and I’ve met these kinds of people when I’ve been the guest.
Nonetheless, in late 2014 I had a guest, Nathalie, a yoga instructor from BC, who was suspiciously micro-managing her booking confirmation well before she arrived. I had a feeling about her being off. I was going away for a few days, and she was to be here for a week. When I handed the keys to her friend in the neighbourhood, he impertinently asked me for my family name (moreover, he would easily have gotten the address from his “friend” the guest). I really didn’t like that! And, having been raised in a good little socialist country2 where everyone is so well-meaning if not always polite, they must know your business and tell you you’re doing it wrong, I wasn’t yet properly skilled at deflecting such privacy-invading questions.
The morning after her arrival, she suddenly departed with the excuse “I can’t stay.” Rather than complain or ask for a refund, she told me to keep the money. A short while after that, I got a letter from Revenu Quebec telling me to stop doing AirBnB or they would prosecute me, with a list of what the fines were. My sneaky feeling was correct: she was an agent posing as a guest.
The legal “narrative” vs reality
I admit to having more than a few acerbic words about the dysfunctionality of the Quebec rental market and so-called housing activists. I also have real, non-exaggerated concerns about the negative social effects of the “gig economy” and over-tourism. While all these activists and pundits, some of whom were laughably blinkered and pedestrian in their thinking, helped shape AirBnB into the company it is today (and the law, as well), I didn’t like certain decisions that opportunists (travellers, landlords, and activists) and AirBnb itself were making about where the culture of the market was going. I would have greatly preferred, for everyone’s sake, that AirBnb and the law had permitted and limited hosting to individuals and families sharing their own homes and “granny suites,” and their own cottages or vacation condos too3. There’s a lot to talk about and I won’t outline my thoughts in detail…
OK but I do have to say this: Now, because of these jerks, cottage owners have found themselves mired in regions and municipalities who have just straight-out banned rentals of less than a duration that’s too long by far for anyone’s vacation. Those cottagers are now screwed — as are the people who’ve vacationed there every year “since the kids were young” or whenever. Thaaaaaannnnkkks, you morons and a*holes, activists and politicians together! I suppose the only people who deserve to use a cottage or vacation rental really are only old money and the nouveau riche!
…but I will say one thing, though, and that’s to all those claims that people on AirBnb are all black marketeering (working under the table): Nope, nice try, not by a long shot, and definitely not from me. Not declaring your income is a criminal act, while renting out a room in your house is not. Get your priorities straight. I’ve always declared my income and the proportion of guest-use expenses, with the lion’s share of the housing expenses being personal-use. And it’s exploitive that people who need a mid-term place to stay are obliged by law to only stay at hotels, while private residences cannot rent out a room for anything less than the inconvenience of a month, also without indemnification. This really is intrusive nannying.
Pivoting and resuming
After that letter, I stopped sharing my home on AirBnB for a few years. Of course, I missed having the income to offset my housing expenses, so I began the occasional home-stay with European high-school students for a month in the summer. It’s fun, but it’s also more work than AirBnb—you have be home every day, you have to provide meals, you have to come up with weekend activities that the girls (in my case) may or may not enjoy.
Although the first program I went with turned out to not be a good fit (some rich kids just can’t be put into middle-class homes), I switched to another that I still help. Basically, I’m a respite home for when an exchange student needs a safe place to land when they’re caught between sets of plans. That means I have a high school student stay with me for a few weeks, twice a year.
There was another reason why I resumed doing AirBnB for month-long bookings (there’s no legal cloud over those), though: I liked being forced out of my tendency to be a hobbit, that it would oblige me to travel, the extensive kind. So in 2016, I rented out the whole house for two month-long bookings. A month-long forced vacation means the dates aren’t exactly your choice, but you take the booking that you can make work, or the one that pays best, provided you have a good feeling about the guests. And generally, the guests were lovely.
It's difficult to plan a month-long vacation regardless of circumstances. In 2016, I went to Oregon and California, then Ontario, and down to Atlanta (with a few weeks in between). In 2017, back to Oregon and California again (I got to see the solar eclipse!). In 2018, I toured England and France for five weeks, and in 2019 I went to Boston, where I'd lived back in 2001. This summer, I went to Italy! I started in Rome and then went down to Sicily, the Puglia coast, San Marino, Venice to Tuscany to Sardinia and back to Venice again… I digress.
Between 2016–2020, the legal cloud around AirBnB lifted simply because everyone was doing it because it’s an economic system that mostly works, even if it could be better. It provided a long-needed ability for people to share latent (unused) resources, capacity otherwise wasted, providing a service for which people would pay, in an inclusive trust network with indemnification for risks and hazards. And so in 2017 I resumed home-sharing, with just one room from 2017 to 2019.
In 2019, I had a lot of entrepreneurial expenditures and I really needed to hustle, so I made the second bedroom available. I’d originally planned to run the Berlin Marathon, but given all my fabulous expenses and how very busy I was, I couldn’t forego that income while paying yet more for travel. It was the most work I’d ever done with Airbnb. It was kind of insane, really. But you only have from late May until the end of October in which to do it, because between November and April, guests are few and far between — only the occasional academic conference. And then…
The Pandemic and winding it down
Then came the pandemic. Honestly, if we hadn’t had the pandemic, I was seriously going to taper off doing any AirBnB that year, because I wanted to rejoin the professional work force.4 Haha! sez a little virus called Covid-19. So that was that for everything (except essential work, which I should have in retrospect done), until case numbers dropped. In June or so, there was a window in which people who needed a place were able to come after quarantine. I only housed a few longer-term people. Someone whose relationship broke up. Another who got a job from France and, upon coming here, decided Montreal wasn’t for him. A construction worker whose home base was actually in Victoriaville.
And then — I’m not sure when exactly it happened — the new (militantly partisan, not-well-designed) law came into effect, about how Quebec was going to prosecute unauthorized AirBnb hosts. Quebec’s style of government panders to the left-leaning authoritarian in everybody, and its civil law tends to lay down authority (to be fair, it doesn’t always maximize it, though the fines are copious) and minimize the ability of a plaintiff or defendant to argue (against the government). And so, in October, 2021, I got another legal package from Revenu Quebec that was weirdly thorough. I’d be paying a fine, or going to court, or both, but I must stop renting a room for anything shorter than 31 days.
So that’s what I did. Might as well make the money to pay the fine, right? But this reprise of having people staying here like a roommate would be short-lived, for reasons I’ll get into below.
The court case
So then I had a court case to sort out. So here’s how that went…first I had a couple of sleepless nights. That’s OK, we all have them, sometimes stressful things like taking a plane or having an argument at work or facing some major-obstruction-to-a-goal will do that, and getting in trouble will do that too. So if ever you get a package like I got… or any ticket or legal proceeding at all, remember: first, this is survivable, second, it’s impersonal, and third, if you just accept that it’s already happened, you can focus on informing yourself about how to minimize the damage.
My first job was to find a lawyer to answer my questions. There are now a lot of legal info websites across the board, and some are very informative, which help you prepare for a productive conversation. I used the Reference Service of the Barreau de Montreal, and got the name of a good fellow (really!) who specializes in traffic tickets but knew about the AirBnB situation. He was frank that the law is pretty cut-and-dried that if you posted a room, regardless of any bookings made or guests had stayed, they had you. But, though the fines and fees are steep, there was wiggle room. He advised me about how to go through the process with the least stress and cost as possible, and funnily enough, that begins with a phone call to the prosecuting lawyer.
To do that I had to call through and make an appointment to speak to the lawyer for Revenu Quebec when she came back from vacation. The waiting was the worst part — you only have 30 days to make your plea and time was ticking! While I waited, I just kept a list of disciplined questions (that means, from general to specific, how one concern or answer might lead to another) about the court process, how long it would take, the costs, and any potential legal ramifications of the decisions I had to make.
So when I had the phone call with the lawyer, it turned out to be unexpectedly pleasant. The only reason I’m telling you this is because this kind of information is often elided! People anticipate nothing but stress and obstruction whenever they have to deal with any bureaucratic stuff, but honestly, experts don’t expect non-experts to be fully informed, and frankly they are there to help. So if you come the least bit prepared, and you have a handle on your anxiety, they enjoy helping you, and it can be a positive experience. Don’t let your own fear or anxiety intimidate you into not asking the questions!
Unless one has exceptionally extenuating circumstances to challenge the charges, the only thing to be done was try to reduce the fees that are tacked onto the fine— in Quebec, the costs of the fines for everything under the sun are published and easily found, but there are two sets of fees worth 25% each tacked on top of any kind of fine. Thus, a $2500 ticket becomes $5000. You can appeal to the court about reducing or waiving one set of the fees. The court can extend you an interest-free, long-term payment plan, but you may have to appear in court to get it (the payment counter can possibly do that themselves).
Basically what I had to do was reply to the package the lawyer had sent me with a Plea of Not Guilty. Then she would submit that to the court, and the court would send us a court date. At that point, the court would appoint me a lawyer to act as defence, whether I continued with the Not Guilty plea or changed it to Guilty. When you change your plea to Guilty, you escape the second round of court dates and extra court costs that would accrue — the matter is dealt with within session. And while you’re represented by a lawyer to advise and represent you, you do get an opportunity to explain any particulars of your situation to the judge.
After having submitted my plea in November 2021, the court case was set for May 2, 2022. I did not lose any sleep over the court case; in fact I kind of looked forward to it, because it’s a learning experience. It turned out there were at least a dozen other AirBnb hosts there with me, and I’d say most of them were pleading Not Guilty. I silently wished them well, but felt assured of my own decision. The most stressful part of it was that the lady nearest me was one of those who listed-without-guests — and she was ill-prepared, upset, and facing a tonne of unnecessary stress and expenses (including future travel) that, had she sought good advice (and the advice I’d gotten came for free!), she would’ve avoided.
In the end, my fine was $3125, which I’m paying in three installments split across two fiscal years.
And then it all unravels
Between the end of the season (and the last of short-term sharing) in 2021 to the court date and beyond, I carried on with life.
I had a winter-time guest of about 6 weeks with the most well-behaved small dog I’d ever seen—too well behaved, it made me feel anxious for its own happiness.
I had an entire-home guest for the month I was in Italy, who proved that the “if they try to bargain, they’re gonna be a bad guest” rubric is true (and he was an AirBnB host himself, renting out his TWO places, just raking it in while here)— such that I should have taken the opportunity (AirBnB authorized it) to ask them to leave. Italy was fantastic, but if it had prevented some of that guy’s gross entitlement, I would’ve been satisfied with two weeks.
Then I had a guest staying for the August-September period, settling into Montreal, and he was interesting in the best way. My mistake was that I opened up the second bedroom listing for this period (a popular time for tourists but also for people coming in to school) by using the Duplicate listing on the AirBnB platform. The new Duplicate was devoid of my personalized content at first, which means explicit house rules and house vibe. And right away, that’s when a terrible, awful, no-good guest booked it. Though to be fair, I don’t think any of my profile content/house rules would have dissuaded him, as you’ll soon see.
I understand a lot of people have had negative experiences with lazy hosts; I’ve been a guest many times too, and have been able to give those ones some useful feedback on room design and “how to be a better host.” I’d learned these same things from chatting with and experiencing other hosts – how to provide novel necessities, how to be hospitable and yet keep out of the way (and keep guests from overtaking the space, too). Useful feedback is always acceptable and actionable. So I’d kind of found this spot between facilitating everything reasonable while putting the kibosh on excessive demands, unnecessary risks, and other shenanigans.
With the terrible, awful, no-good guest, I’d found myself in a situation where someone from here felt absolutely entitled to use ALL my space and my resources without instruction or consideration (excuse me but it does not take 5 hours of cooking and oven time to make a &^%*¡ plate of spaghetti), because he’d paid “rent” – and he had a substance use disorder, to boot. Holy hell. And as it was in August-September, when all the students come back and there’s no availability, I found out that AirBnB had zero plan or latent capacity to deal with problems. Here I had a bona-fide rule-breaking, (garage-door-motor breaking!), abusive “cancel this guest” situation, and they gave me the script-following-agent runaround, where between every hand off it was like the process reset to zero. Try as I might to get action, AirBnB would not cancel the booking, and unless they cancelled it, I would be on the hook for his accommodation — at many times the price of what mine was. It was horrible.
I thank my lucky stars that my first guest was at work during the day and otherwise wasn’t much irritated by the terrible guest’s loud TV and constant vaping on the front steps. When I took a weekend trip just to get the F away from this terrible energy – and his hectoring me! – I had a no-nonsense guy friend from California come and stay in my room to keep everyone out of trouble. (Terrible guest didn’t like that, but couldn’t do anything other than slam doors about it.) And when I came back from my weekend away, my friend took over staying in the room that the good guest had just departed from. I had to basically conciliate with the dude to be on his best behaviour for the rest of the booking, and I would stop trying to throw him out. And thus we waited it out.
Decision made. Next
I had one more booking already set for October, a nice lady from France and her cat. With that, I basically deleted all my antecedent, historical listings (saved but not listed) as well as the current listings off the platform. That was It. No more! I had had enough.
And so, while my California friend and my final guest were here, I began throwing myself into an extended “Make This House Mine Alone” project — changing the locks, painting the walls, redecorating, making long-imagined changes. I didn’t have to keep anything with a mind as to how it would serve anyone other than myself (and friends who stay over). I brought things out of storage that I hadn’t wanted to share, to now enjoy them. Some upgrades became doable, as I didn’t have to be conscious of an external impact — especially that of having to update photographs or release yet more information about me and my home to the whole wide world on the web.
The whole thing is rather privacy-obliterating, shockingly so, at times. I wanted to make my home private private private, no, seriously, back off, Private! No one comes here now who isn’t expressly invited (a rather bossy old friend imposed a couple of times, but that’s been resolved). My public works, my open arms to the world, are limited to a beautiful garden that passersby can look at, bunnies that they can occasionally see, and a shade tree they can stand under. Oh, and this blog.
And though I will stay at others’ AirBnBs in the future, especially those with whom I’ve stayed before, I’ll prioritize staying at good hostels and the occasional hotel. This is going to reintroduce a bit more rigour into my travel planning. But that’s good, because over-tourism sucks. Oh and I’m gonna get a sailboat. I will. I’ve been saying that for years, but now that I don’t spend any time on sheltering others, I can spend time on a second shelter for myself.
For me, AirBnB was good for the most part. I learned a lot about people. Being a host made me more both more conscientious and at ease with my own authority (this is no mean feat). It really added to how I moved through the world while travelling, or at a function — if you’re a good guest, if you’re helpful, doors and hearts open to you. So I’m grateful for the experience, but I did it for too long, and that really is the end of that.
Ways Airbnb hosts have failed me:
Not clean (one was filthy)
Host was unavailable and/or lacking in hospitality at check-in
Provided poor directions from the train station
Been inconsiderate about fetching me from the train station (this can be necessary, and help is appreciated)
Been unaccommodating about my need for laundry, sundries, or storing luggage before/after checkout
Things AirBnB guests…
Broke:
Small aquarium (empty and compensated for)
Shower door (Osheaga party people, part found and repaired)
Glass soap dish
Royal typewriter (completely decommissioned by a child)
Garage door motor, irreparable
“Reappropriated” (stole):
Dymo label printer - a 1980s model
Texas Instruments BA-II Financial calculator
Vinyl LPs (three separate occasions): Joni Mitchell Blue, Sinead O’Connor I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
Woven silver choker necklace from Turkiye
- I'm pretty sure I know who took the last two
Consider 2012–2022. If this really is everything, the list is fairly short.
Footnotes are where all the fun is!
- I had another party couple from Toronto who stayed the following year’s Osheaga, and they were equally badly behaved (and rude AF) while I was still here. So I embargoed Osheaga bookings after that. If someone wanted to book that weekend, they could stay only if they had no idea it was Osheaga. ↩︎
- There’s an undercurrent in Denmark – the Jantelov – that You shall not consider yourself better than Us. There’s a similar undercurrent in Quebec and in Canada that You Owe Us, and you can try to be deserving of our magnanimity, but you probably won’t succeed, and whatever you do, we’ll certainly judge you as wanting. ↩︎
- Including duplexes and triplexes in student-residence quarters. Students are there September to April. Why should they not house tourists from May to August? From a purely economic point of view, the tourists would subsidize the students, because with a mandated loss for either the student or the landlord for the summer months, the rest-of-the-year rent would need to cover the vacancy. ↩︎
- As I mentioned above, there are real, legitimate concerns for both an individual and the government (investment! tax revenue!) about the gig economy. Any division of one’s effort and attention is usually not additive (e.g you can be a singer and a dancer, but try being a singer and a soldier). The part-time effort required by a gig like this eats away at one’s
will to live(joke) ability to focus fully on a job search. It then interferes with many kinds of full-time jobs, and it is a “helpful” distraction from running a more lucrative business.
But ultimately, if you have education and training and capacity for better work (with better pay!), it’s a form of failure to spend your time doing things beneath that capacity. This is a self-accusation, and it’s legitimate for most. Even if the need to take gig work is not your fault, because there really, really is a lack of governance coupled with dysfunctional business and HR attitudes and practices that are primed to separate and shunt people into silos of limited prospect. It’s still your responsibility to claw out of your own inertia. You have to jump through all the hoops and take all the plodding steps to make sure your time eventually gets properly used and rewarded. And while a gig job can be pleasant and give you some control over your schedule, it does not a career make. ↩︎
Fun read from the side of an Airbnb host. Hope you’ve fixed the garage opener!