David K. Blum and other neighbours have endured near-nightly disruptions from a unit that has been advertised as a "bachelor party loft (that) can accommodate up to 16 people" and has been rented at $1,000 per night.

It started off as just a noisy party next door. But when it went on for days, David K. Blum called his friend who lived in the apartment, and was informed the friend had moved.

The partying continued for over a week, when on a whim Blum searched Airbnb and found an ad for the apartment in question.

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“My heart sank,” Blum told the Montreal Gazette last week, “because I saw the pool table, which is what I had been hearing — I didn’t know what it was — and the foosball table. More importantly, I saw four beds in one bedroom.”

Expedia, Almost a year later, Blum and other neighbours have endured near-nightly disruptions from the locale advertised on Airbnb and other sites including Booking.com Travelocity and Hotels.com as “Le Bachelor Party Loft Vieux-Montréal” and variations thereof, which “can accommodate up to 16 people” at $1,000 per night.

“The first time I found (the ad), the description was crazy,” Blum said. “It was like, ‘Come party till the early hours of the morning.’ It was bonkers.”

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Blum tracked down the owner of the building, Shiller Lavy Realties . After much back and forth, he met the company’s property manager, Teresa Cristiano, and was put in touch with the tenant at the address, 111A des Soeurs-Grises St., who goes by the name Amr.

“What I found out — I don’t know the exact number, but Shiller Lavy rents a lot of units to this guy Amr.”

Blum met with Amr, who said he is the son of the owner of a Saudi hotel company and that he runs a website called Hometrotting.com , which also rents apartments in New York, Chicago and Toronto.

“He told me in Montreal alone, he has 60 (apartments),” Blum said.

Amr agreed to some concessions, such as moving the pool table away from the wall adjoining Blum’s apartment; he also adjusted the language of the ads to make them less obviously focused on debauchery. (Some descriptions of the place boasted of “2 stripper poles inside the property” and that it was “best for bachelor event.”) But the noise continued.

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“Nothing happened,” Blum said. “The partying was constant. I wrote to Shiller Lavy and said, ‘This has been going on for months; it’s a huge problem. If it doesn’t change, I’m going to have to take action, and I don’t want to do that.’ ”

Blum showed the Montreal Gazette a formal email he then received from Shiller Lavy’s lawyer, Tiffany Hanskamp, on Dec. 5, requesting that he cease all communication with Shiller Lavy’s employees and go through her moving forward.

Feeling that their exchange was not productive, Blum ceased communicating with Hanskamp and Shiller Lavy. He was then out of the country from January to May, but he returned to find the problem ongoing.

“The feeling I got from this whole thing is that Shiller Lavy didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of Amr, since they do so much business with him. But at the end of the day, there’s myself, the guy on the other side and the guy upstairs (who are living with this). It’s non-stop.”

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Shiller Lavy did not respond to the Montreal Gazette’s requests for comment.

Blum estimates there are parties five nights a week in the apartment. He describes garbage left on the curb on random days, people drinking on the roof and rowdy antics until all hours. The police have been called more times than he can count.

Another neighbour, who lives on McGill St., confirmed Blum’s assertions.

“I call the cops every single weekend,” said the neighbour, who asked that his name not be used. “It’s been close to a year now, almost every single night. … It’s terrible. It’s not tolerable. It shouldn’t be allowed. This is a residential area. We all share the space together, but what they’re doing is out of control.”

The property manager of a nearby building, who preferred to remain anonymous, said all his tenants are being disturbed by the situation.

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“It drives us nuts,” he said.

The Montreal police said it could not comment on specific files, and that all complaints are confidential.

Blum has been in touch with an inspector at the city of Montreal, who looked into the situation last week. The city confirmed to the Montreal Gazette that it had received a complaint about the operation of an illegal tourist accommodation and commercial activity out of the address. The information was passed on to Revenu Québec and the host was informed, according to city press representative Audrey Gauthier. She said a city inspector has been assigned to the case.

That may help turn the tide. Last week, the Airbnb ad for the apartment disappeared; it remains up on Hometrotting.com and other sites.

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Until very recently, the apartment was rented out on Airbnb by a “superhost” named Mike, and before that by someone named Hakim.

In a CBC story on the corporations behind certain Airbnb profiles, Mike was revealed to be a fake name with stock photo used by Hakim. The CBC quoted Hakim, who said he employed the alias due to previous racist comments about his looks.

Mike was recently replaced by “Seb.” But Seb is also not real. Though described on Airbnb as a Montrealer and “a recent university grad who has a job in IT in the city,” almost all of Seb’s 68 listings can also be found on Hometrotting.com , and a quick search revealed his headshot to be a stock photo widely used online.

Seb joined Airbnb in 2010, according to his profile , and his properties have been reviewed 8,200 times — “more reviews than anyone,” according to the CBC story, which called him “one of the most prolific Airbnb hosts in Canada.” Old reviews of Seb’s listings contain references to both Mike and Hakim.

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Airbnb did not respond to requests for comment. A phone call to the number Blum had for Amr led to an international ringtone and a voice mail recording saying the person at that number was not available. Calls to Hometrotting Montreal on Friday and Saturday were answered by an employee who said Seb was in charge of renting out the apartments, but that he was out of the country. A message was left for Seb and/or Hakim, but neither had called back by press time.

Blum’s problems aren’t over. Friday afternoon, he sent the Montreal Gazette a short video he had just taken of nine young men (out of a total of around 30, he said) filing out of 111A des Soeurs-Grises St., along with photos of a rented minibus they had boarded.

It was looking to be another long night.