Airbnb renter trashes luxury San Francisco home, leaving piles of trash, feces, needles

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A man who rented a luxury home in San Francisco through Airbnb trashed it, KTVU has learned, leaving used needles and human waste throughout the $5-million home.

The owner of the home does not want to reveal any identifying details about where this house is located, other than that it is in one of The City’s most desirable neighborhoods.

On Friday, KTVU got an exclusive look inside the home and spoke with the property manager, Egan Lim, who was dressed in a hazmat suit and supervised cleaning up the mess. 

VIDEO: Tour the home trashed by an Airbnb renter

The tour showed empty bottles, bent spoons and open containers, among other trash and debris. Plus as Lim described, there were "needles throughout the entire living space.”  There were dozens of Amazon boxes inside the home. Blood stained the sheets in the bedroom. The trash cans were full and appeared as though they had never been emptied. Lim said pest control crews needed to be called in and the plumbing currently unusable.

Lim said that after the tenant, who has not been identified, checked out after about three and a half months, he surveyed the property on Sunday. “We went immediately smelled the stench right outside the door,” he said. “We saw garbage everywhere.”

Lim added: “He essentially used this place as a safe place for him to inject heroin.”

In an email, Airbnb spokesperson Mattie Zazueta told KTVU that the company has "zero tolerance for this type of behavior and have removed this individual from our community."

She said Airbnb is now working with the homeowner to help him file a claim under the Million Dollar Host Guarantee.

Zazueta added that there have been more than 300 million guest arrivals to date, and significant property damage for claims totalling more than $1,000 were reported .004 percent of the time.

By noon, most of the mess had been cleaned up, although crews were still picking through the grass outside the home looking for more debris and needles. 

 

KTVU's Debora Villalon and Lisa Fernandez contributed to this report.