How to pull off a hotel shakedown
1. Identify a city that has strict ‘rent stabilisation’ laws, designed to keep some properties affordable for long-term tenants during times of rent inflation.
2. Find a hotel that’s subject to these laws – these will often be regular hotels that at some point in their past hosted long-term tenants as well as hotel guests.
3. Block-book a number of rooms for one night. Fill them with pliable friends, acquaintances and people of no fixed abode.
4. At check in, request a lease for all members of your party to become permanent tenants. The hotel will be legally obliged to comply.
5. As the rent is tied to the amount paid by the previous tenant, who may have left decades ago, the rooms will cost you a fraction of the amount paid by hotel guests.
6. Permanent tenants have the right to receive hotel services and cannot be evicted without a court order, so you can relax while draining the hotel’s revenues.
7. Tell the hotel management that your party is keen to move out but can’t afford to do so. Mention you have launched a crowdfunding page to pay for this relocation.
8. Feign astonishment when a very generous donation is made. Use a fraction of the cash to relocate to a different rent-stabilised hotel and pocket the difference.
9. Repeat steps 2-8. You are now rich. Buy Trump Tower, knock it down and have it rebuilt
as a bungalow.
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