I have been notified by my county asking why I haven’t paid fees and taxes for renting my home. I have been living in my home for two years and have never rented it. I informed the county and they suggested getting Airbnb to take the listing down. They provided the link to the active listing.
This is not my listing. I have had two parties drive by my house and ask me if they could see my house. Then one party asked me if I’m the host. I have contacted Airbnb at least thirty times to have them take down the listing and they simply will not do it. I have spent at least forty hours on the phone with them. They have never called back. I have contacted filed complaints with the Attorney General of Colorado.
This listing has pictures of the inside and outside of my house. The location, on the ad, is easy to find by potential renters because the area has only a few homes within it. I feel like I’m being harassed. My next step is to get in touch with the County Attorney and law enforcement. I’m very exhausted.
Guess thats good enough reason not to ever sell our house. Original owners. I hope to make it into the Guiness Book of World Records. If not then I guess Dr. Phil is the next best option
A parable that relates to your situation:
Years ago, I moved into an apartment and got my hard-line phone hooked up. Turns out my new phone number was formerly a job hotline number for a local school district. I worked nights, and was on-call during the day, so for weeks I got calls, sometimes several a day, from people wanting jobs with the district.
I phoned the district, explained my predicament, and asked that they publish their new number. That didn’t happen. The calls continued. This cycle repeated several times. In the interim I had changed my voicemail message to reflect that this wasn’t the job line…but the calls kept coming.
So I started answering all of my calls with “XXXXXXXXXX School District Job Line. How can I help you?” with as chipper a tone as I could muster, jerked as I was from a sound slumber. I would listen to the caller’s pitch, then, still in my district employee persona, would become, shall we say, far more abrupt in my language toward them. To say I was discourteous was an exercise in gross understatement; I was brutally vulgar. I would conclude each call with something along the lines of, “Thanks for calling XXXXXXXXX School District but, like I said earlier, please go —- yourself in the —- with a hammer, you illiterate sack of —–. Enjoy your day.”
I didn’t have to pull this routine too many times before the calls magically stopped coming. Pity. I was starting to enjoy it.
The takeaway? Your house is on AirBnB, you let every inquiry that comes in know exactly what AirBnB thinks of them and their vacation plans. Be creative…have fun with it. AirBnB doesn’t care what you have to say, but they may care far more when their “representative” starts generating complaints to their offices.
Put up a big sign on your property stating that AirBnB is scummy and this is a fake listing and that trespassers will be prosecuted. Maybe reach out to local news outlets to shame AirBnB.
Wow. What a situation. Who could have done that to you. How did they get pics of the interior?
You can get photographs from old online real estate listings
You can call out @airbnb, @airbnbhelp and @bchesky on Twitter.
Get your local press involved.
Sometimes enough public pressure will compel Airbnb to take action
How did the person who listed your property get pictures of the inside?
Bill,
if you enter practically ANY address in google, in 90% cases you will find old ads of the house when it had been for sale: inside / outside.