Houston has a 20% vacancy rate [1]. Unfortunately, I can't recall the source but I did read a study that concluded that Airbnb has no effect on rental prices where the vacancy rate is 6% or more but it absolutely drives prices up in low vacancy rate cities.
I live in one with < 1% vacancy rate and it's also a tourist city. Apartment prices have gone up more than 50% in the past few years.
"When demand is inelastic, even relatively small changes in housing supply can cause significant changes in the cost of housing.10 This intuition is clearly validated in a number of careful empirical studies looking precisely at the effect of Airbnb introduction and expansion on housing costs." [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...]
"At the median owner-occupancy rate zipcode, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices. Considering the median annual Airbnb growth in each zipcode, these results translate to an annual increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in house prices for the median zipcode in our data, which accounts for about one fifth of actual rent growth and about one seventh of actual price growth" [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832]
Both of us look at the same evidence, just interpreted differently.
If the stats you brought are correct, that means that there exist a considerable amount of tenants which couldn't afford their apartments if not for Airbnb. Ultimately, as rental markets balance their price against vacancies, market rates will go up.
"1% increase in Airbnb listings is causally associated with a 0.018% increase in rental rates and a 0.026%"
This is about a fifth of the overall increase. We're talking about a $9-10 a month difference in rent in most urban areas. Not great, but clearly Airbnb is a small part of the problem.
If Airbnbs were having a significant impact forcing people out of homes, we would see it as an increase in the vacancy rate - but overall vacancy rate is still dropping like a rock in the US: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/current/index.html
The foreign ownership thing seems like a bit of a distraction. They don't seem to have significant impact on vacancy rates - they are still insanely low even in places like NY and SF. And to the extent that they are buying up properties as speculation that seems like a symptom of supply constraints more than a cause of.
You won't find one. The most cited article I've found shows that the most significant effect Airbnb has on rentals is a 0.5% rise in rental rates in Manhattan. It's not 0, but it's pretty damn close.
Trying to find the original study. It was paid for by housing advocacy groups who generally oppose Airbnb, so I want to understand their methodology since they certainly have a bias.
"If the 8,058 units defined as Impact Listings were made available on the rental market, the number of vacant rental units citywide would increase by 10 percent and the vacancy rate would rise to 4.0 percent"
So, in other words, if all of the full-time "entire apartment" listings were to hit the market as vacant units immediately, the vacancy rate would increase by 10%. This is not the same thing as Airbnb reducing housing stock by 10%.
This is actually probably more interesting:
"53 percent of all Airbnb listings are located in one of the following five “macro-neighborhoods” - East Village/Lower East Side (LES), Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen, West Village/Greenwich Village/SoHo, Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick, and Bedford Stuyvesant/Crown Heights."
Something I think a lot of people don't appreciate about Airbnb's potential impact on the housing market is that a lot of the listings are concentrated in a few areas, so while Airbnb might not impact the housing market that much overall for a particular city, it can have a pretty significant impact on individual neighborhoods.
What's driving housing prices up are bad city/state level policies, not airbnb. Airbnb makes housing more effective, by housing more people for longer periods of time.
Housing utilization goes up with Airbnb, not down.
It shows that AirBNBs do push up rents - but even in desirable parts of Boston with a lot of AirBNBs - it's /only/ responsible for a 0.4% increase.
Keep in mind that rents have been increasing by >4% per year for 20 years in Boston. A .4% increase is 10% of that. General inflation is /at least/ 50% of it. The other ~40% is coming from elsewhere.
Unless AirBNBs make up a substantial portion of new sales - it is hard to blame them for the majority of price increases.
Rentals have been a thing since people have been travelers. It's easy to point a finger at Airbnb, but a lack of affordable housing existed long before they were around. You could argue that hotels are using space that could be used for housing locals, too. Is Airbnb a factor in prices going up, yes. Is Airbnb the only factor, clearly no.
The article you cite is not supporting your view. In fact it lists many cases where Airbnb (or short term leases in general) have a significant effect on both sales and rental property supply and is pushing up prices as a result.
That article is just anecdotal, as such claims always seem to be, whether the claim is that rents are going up because of Airbnb or going down because of Airbnb.
Precisely this. Go to any city in the world where new housing is not artificially constricted by local governments and you will find that the effect of airbnb rentals on housing prices are minimal.
I will not deny that the presence of airbnb rentals in a city can drive up the incremental cost of housing, but it is a proximate cause, not the root cause. The root cause is artificially constrained supply.
This isn't true in NYC, we're at 98-99% utilization. If anything AirBNB makes this worse, it's encouraging people to rent an apartment to visitors instead of releasing it into the rental market.
If you look at a $169/night AirBNB rate, that translates into about $5000/month if it's fully rented. Even at a 90% you are making more money than a 12-month lease. This will encourage landlords to not lease vacant apartments, thus decreasing supply and raising prices. I know of building owners that have been experimenting with AirBNB as it's more profitable for them.
I live in one with < 1% vacancy rate and it's also a tourist city. Apartment prices have gone up more than 50% in the past few years.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-17/houston-commercial-...
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