Hospitality firm sues tenant over $1,300 Airbnb listing in Chelsea

At the site of a stalled hotel project in West Chelsea, a former real estate agent has been accused of illegally occupying a pair of apartments and renting them on Airbnb. 

Netherlands-based PPHE Hotel Group, owner of 540 West 29th Street, sued tenant Ethan Noorani this week for allegedly breaking into and squatting at the building, then furnishing a 2,000-square-foot apartment and listing it on the short-stay platform for a hefty nightly sum.

“This is another Airbnb opportunist,” said an attorney for PPHE, “who got himself into the apartment and is now using the court system to keep from being evicted.” Reached by telephone, Noorani denied the allegations but declined to comment further. 

The lawsuit follows the delay of a New York City law requiring apartment owners to register short-stay listings, and is the latest salvo in a struggle between tenants, landlords and government authorities to regulate the rental platform amid a travel industry disrupted by Covid and a housing shortage that has made urban centers more costly for residents. 

PPHE told a Manhattan court this week that, as part of a weekly walkthrough to ensure the building remained vacant, it detected Noorani illegally entering and furnishing one of its apartments to list to short-stay renters. 

Developer Robert Davis’ Jaeger Realty was charged with safeguarding the building, according to court documents. Davis did not respond to a request for comment.

The hospitality firm denies leasing the three-story building to Noorani or anyone else since acquiring it in 2020 from Largo Development to build 98 hotel rooms and 55 condo units on an assemblage on West 29th Street. Demolition permits were filed at the site in 2018. But five years later, it remains standing. 

PPHE’s attorney declined to comment on the stalled project, which would likely need approval from the City Council following a city-wide permitting rule passed for new hotels in 2021. No new hotels have been approved since the rule went into effect, according to records The Real Deal reviewed.

Noorani’s Airbnb listing for the property, which has since been taken down, contains reviews dating back to at least December 2022, at odds with PPHE’s timeline of Noorani entering the building in May for the first time. When confronted by the police at PPHE’s behest, Noorani proffered a two-year lease ending in June 2024, according to the lawsuit. 

PPHE claims the lease is fraudulent and, incorrectly, that the address of the building owner on lease traces to a Brooklyn bodega. In fact, the owner’s address on the lease is 185 South 4th Street, the site of a rental building that Largo owns in Brooklyn.

The lease is signed by Noorani as the tenant; the owner’s line is initialed simply as “DB”. On June 13, PPHE told Noorani to vacate the apartments within 10 days. He has not vacated.

PPHE’s attorney characterized Noorani’s behavior as “a shakedown” because, he said, an offer to settle the dispute was made quickly following the filing of the lawsuit.  

“This is an unintended consequence of protecting tenants,” PPHE’s attorney said. “Some deserve protection and others take advantage.”

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Airbnb has proposed giving landlords a portion of revenue earned by short-stay rentals, although the program covers only a small minority of rental inventory on the platform. Landlords, in an attempt to stay on the right side of bans on short-stay rentals, have sued tenants.

The company recently pushed back on data suggesting that its revenue was cratering, although its pace of growth has declined.

CORRECTION: A former version of this story identified Largo Development as the owner of 540 West 29th Street and the plaintiff in the legal dispute.