I'm almost homeless: Why you should not go outside Airbnb's payment system

This is the story of how an airbnb host accepted a lower offer for his place for a month, but only if I paid in cash. I was desperate, with no place else to go and against my own good sense I did it.

The place turned out to be infested, and without using airbnb's payment system, we were without recourse.

My co-founder and I moved to Austin Texas with enough money for two months of runway. All we needed to do in those two months was triple our monthly revenue to become ramen profitable. We felt we could do it in one month.

We booked one place on airbnb for 8 days and it was fantastic. We thought in that time we could find a more permanent place to stay. It was far harder to find housing in Austin than we anticipated.

We were getting desperate so we tried airbnb for a place for a month. I had read here at hacker news that people have great success negotiating better prices by contacting the hosts.

We only had a couple more days to find a place and we were getting desperate.

We found a place listed for $810 a month on airbnb. I offered the host $500. He gave me his phone number in a way so as to confuse airbnb's phone number filters.

I called him and he told me he would rent his place for $500 per month, but only if we paid in cash.

I knew it was a bad idea, but it was becoming a choice between a hotel (which I had no money for) and homelessness.

Everyone else we contacted said their places were booked or were 1200 per month or more. We were running out of options.

I paid him $500 in cash the day I arrived at the place and everything looked good in the day time.

When the sun set the first night we were watching Forrest Gump when we saw a gigantic cockroach climbing on the wall!

It was huge! I have never seen one that big in my life! I jumped up, and grabbed my backpack off the floor and another one runs out from under my backpack!

It turns out the place was crawling with roaches. We started seeing them everywhere.

They were large and not afraid of us, they would charge at us.

We realized this was not going to be a place where we could focus on our start up. We couldn't even get a good night sleep because I would dream of bugs crawling on me.

Then we start to notice that the host has put little cockroach traps in every room, we even see some rat traps in the kitchen.

It was after midnight now and we decided to just sleep there that one night and figure something out in the morning.

We slept with the lights on to hopefully scare the roaches away.

The place also had a ton of mosquitos, so many that I would get bit three times walking from the bedroom to the kitchen.

The next day we are seeing roaches in the kitchen crawling over the counters and everything. An apple that we bought and put on the counter had been cored out by what I imagine was an army of roaches that night.

The host isn't returning our calls. He finally comes around the next day.

We tell him that we are leaving and that we can't stay because of the roaches.

He claims that roaches are just a part of life in Texas and are completely normal.

He does give us back $160 dollars in cash though and tells us he will give us the rest later when he gets it. He says he will keep in touch.

We had to rent another place and pay another month's rent. This place doesn't have a real kitchen, so we are buying much more expensive food and burning money faster. Now things are getting tight. We are counting on this guy to come through for us with a refund.

I had been trying to contact him all week and he is ignoring me. Im trying to find a time to meet him to give him back the keys and get some boxes we had left there.

When I see him he tells me he moved back in and took the place off airbnb and doesn't feel he owes us anything because we should have sucked it up and dealt with the roaches.

I say I will feel it was fair if we pay half, and he says life isn't fair.

If we had used airbnb's payment system we could have gotten a full refund when the place was not as advertised within 24 hours. The host also chose a flexible cancellation policy which would have allowed us to get a full refund of any unused days.

So always use the airbnb payment system no matter how much pressure a host puts on you not too!

I would like to thank the airbnb founders for creating such a great service, I will definitely be using it again and recommending it to friends and I will always be telling them to use the airbnb payment system!

This whole thing has put our start up in a precarious place, but we are finding ways around it. We had not wanted to raise any money or borrow any money, but now we are looking into offering friends and family 1 year 12% bonds (personal loans).

I can probably do a couple consulting jobs which will cover things, I had wanted to avoid this because our start up is really picking up, we have about 1/4 million users a month now.

We are also thinking of creating a product related to our startup and raising money for it on kickstarter.

I also might sell my macbook air and Sony FX-7 camera.

It's been a good lesson, and makes me more sympathetic to people in a bad situation. Sometimes its just a couple things going wrong...