Konrad Bicher, the Mennonite Airbnb Hustler of Manhattan

To the extent that destinies can still be found in Manhattan, that the Lincoln Tunnel is still capable of delivering a doe-eyed adolescent from his life milking cows into a glittering and limitless future, Konrad Bicher found his dream life in the spare bedroom of a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Inwood. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly the New York of Bicher’s dreams — it felt about as far from Times Square as the small town in Pennsylvania where he’d grown up — but one thing about it mattered a lot to him. “As long as I could say, ‘I live in Manhattan,’ I made it,” Bicher told me. He’d grown up Mennonite, a culture antithetical to the fast-paced lifestyle he hoped to realize in the city. “I didn’t want to go to any of these other boroughs. I didn’t care if it was in Inwood, 500 feet from the Bronx with the waterway. I wanted Manhattan,” Bicher said.

Just as important as the location, though, was the apartment’s spare bedroom. To help pay the rent, Bicher started listing the room on Airbnb. Eventually, he began renting out the whole place. “I was like, ‘Wow, what happens if I get 100 of these? Two hundred of these units?’ It was just a numbers game,” Bicher recalled. “That’s when everything changed.”

Over the next eight years, Bicher, 31, leased dozens of apartments, assembling a portfolio of short-term rentals that he then listed on Airbnb, Craigslist, Facebook’s Gypsy Housing, and other online marketplaces, often skirting the law. It was a gritty, labor-intensive enterprise that required Bicher to juggle calendars, establish relationships with landlords, and play Whac-A-Mole as problems came up. As a teenager, Bicher said he had fantasized about working in Manhattan’s real-estate industry, and he hoped the short-term rentals would be the beginning of a long, lucrative career. “I wanted to walk into a hotel with my name on the outside of it, to make a statement in the real-estate game,” Bicher said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite as planned.”

I first spoke with Bicher last February, after The Real Deal reported on a string of landlords’ lawsuits alleging that the young mogul was making a fortune renting their apartments on Airbnb while claiming COVID hardship and refusing to pay them rent. Bicher, around this time, had been posting pictures online of himself boarding private jets, getting out of a red Ferrari and an orange Lamborghini, and vacationing by the Mediterranean. I wanted to know if Bicher had a legitimate defense or if he was simply living out his childhood dream at the expense of New York City landlords. To The Real Deal, Bicher had called himself “the Wolf of Airbnb,” explaining that he was “someone who is hungry and ruthless enough to get on top of the financial ladder.” During our first conversation, he told me that he’d framed that story and hung it in his office.

At first, Bicher brushed off the lawsuits as mere potholes on his road to success. To him, legal battles were a rite of passage in the real-estate industry. But the experience also seemed to have taught him a lesson about its perils, and, when I asked him for details about his defense, he described himself not as a wolf but as a whistleblower. “When tenants don’t stand up for their rights, they get run over, taken over, and completely destroyed,” he said. “I’m going to stand up for my rights, and eventually, it’s all going to get exposed. I’ll never back down.”

Growing up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, Bicher always felt like an outsider. He was adopted as an infant by Mennonite parents and raised in the faith’s modest, intentional way of living, without a television or radio. His father was a pastor who worked in construction while also making custom furniture. Bicher loved his family, but from a young age, he knew he was different. It wasn’t just that he had brown skin in a tight-knit, overwhelmingly white community. He also sensed that this provincial universe was too small for his ambitions. “I felt like a bird in a cage. I wanted to travel the world and live in New York,” Bicher told me.

Bicher may have felt like an outsider, but he did learn how to work. As a child, he spent long hours in his father’s shop and mowed lawns. Like other boys in his community, Bicher stopped attending school after eighth grade, around the time he started harboring entrepreneurial ideations. After 14-hour days nonmetaphorically mending fences for his uncle’s company, Bicher said he would go to Barnes & Noble and dive into books by business gurus like Tony Robbins, John Maxwell, and Robert Kiyosaki. He secretly enrolled in a night GED program. Afraid he would stick out in his traditional clothes, he bought jeans and a polo shirt at Walmart and stashed them beneath the seat of a work van.

In Bicher’s telling, he eventually sat his parents down and told them it was time for him to leave for New York.“It was just a laughing stock. It was funny to them. No one believed in me when I left,” Bicher said. “Everyone had a $25,000 to $30,000 job. They were happy, satisfied, and most of my friends are still there. But that wasn’t me. I could never settle.”

What Bicher failed to mention during multiple interviews was that he wasn’t alone in his exodus: He’d moved to New York with Bethany Beiler, who was then his wife. Beiler had also been raised in the Mennonite community. She met Bicher when she was a teenager, but he was engaged to someone else. After Bicher broke up with his fiancée, he started dating Beiler and the two soon married. (According to Beiler, Bicher’s parents were totally supportive of his move to New York.)

“We moved to New York with barely enough money to pay the first month’s rent,” said Beiler. “I would manage the Airbnbs. I would have to go to the laundromat and wash the sheets every time someone would leave and clean the house. That was my job.” Beiler estimated that she managed eight apartments for Bicher while also doing odd jobs like background acting. “The mindset of a Mennonite man is that the woman does all of the chores and the man just provides. But in this case, it was like I was doing all of the housework, and I felt like I was bringing in the income as well.”

While Beiler was taking care of the business, Bicher spent time with his friend Matt King. Like Bicher, King had also been adopted into a Mennonite family. According to Beiler, he’d moved to New York before they had and encouraged the couple to follow. (King did not return multiple requests for comment.) Once they were all in the city, Bicher and King began working together. “Whatever they were doing to make money, they wouldn’t tell me,” Beiler said. “I was taught to do the right thing and never hurt people, and he was taught the same, and Matt was, too. So who knows what got in their heads?”

In October 2014, when Gwenaelle Berhault arrived at the cramped studio apartment on 44th Street in Hell’s Kitchen that she planned to sublet, she was surprised to find someone already living there. A week earlier, Berhault had sent a man named Kyle Hoover a cashier’s check for $1,760 for the security deposit. According to police records, she was one of at least three people who tried to move into the same apartment on October 1.

A similar scheme played out at other apartments in Manhattan that fall. People looking for short-term housing would find a listing on Craigslist or HomeAway. They’d get in touch, and someone purportedly named Kyle Hoover, Luis King, or Matthew Weaver would give them a tour. Satisfied, they would meet up again with Hoover or King or Weaver and hand over a cashier’s check. Then, when they showed up to move in, they’d find someone else living there or the key didn’t work. When detectives tracked down those three names, they found they were all connected by one person: Konrad Bicher. He and King had temporarily rented the apartments for a week, shown them to prospective tenants, collected security deposits, and disappeared by move-in day.

In February 2015, Bicher was arrested and charged with grand larceny. A month later, while out on bail, he sold an Amtrak ticket he’d bought with a stolen credit card to an undercover police officer in Penn Station, whereupon he was rearrested and charged again. Bicher pleaded guilty in both cases and was sentenced to 30 days of community service and five years’ probation. King, who was also charged in the rental scheme, pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to six months in prison with five years of probation.

Soon after Bicher’s arrest, Beiler tired of his high jinks and went back to Pennsylvania, filing for divorce later that year. A lawyer told Beiler she didn’t have the money to fight for her share of the Airbnb business, so there wasn’t much to contest. She moved to Florida and opened her own housekeeping business.

Without Beiler in his life, Bicher looked to other places for community. He found friends at Hillsong, the cool-kids church that holds services at the Beacon Theater. He attended entrepreneur meetups and conferences featuring next-generation thought-leader hopefuls like Dream Masterminds (motto: “Hustle inspires hustle”) and Wake Up Wealthy, a boot-camp-style event for men who are “ready to STEP THE FUCK UP and start DOMINATING” their lives.

Meanwhile, he continued to build his rental portfolio. He solicited friends to rent apartments in their names. In some cases, the people he enlisted didn’t even live in New York. At least one…