I totally agree, but it's not like this data is hidden. It would be relatively straight forward to monitor how many Airbnb units operate at any given time just by looking at the site repeatedly, and you could approximate how many rentals exist using tax data and corporate data.
Two problems mentioned in the rebuttal: the study counts every Airbnb unit as a rental taken permanently off the market, and the dataset counts every blocked-off calendar date as a night the unit was booked. Both of those are obvious over-counting. A study that doesn't even try to account for those is pretty obviously political.
Airbnb should have posted estimates of how much this over-counting could distort the data, because it sounds like a lot. $616M is one of those numbers that sounds high but in context probably isn't, so it wouldn't surprise me if those two distortions wiped out the number, or at least cut it to below headline worthy.
If you had a large-scale set of data of AirBnB listings that was reasonably accurate, that could be valuable to many people, for all sorts of reasons.
I'm slightly skeptical of some of your specific suggested markets, though. I would guess landlords are not likely to be a big market. The apartment and condo buildings that want to shut down AirBnB in their building already have a fairly easy time looking through nearby listings and identifying the ones in their building. The ones who aren't paying enough attention to do that will probably not be paying enough attention to find out that they can buy a list from you, either, unless you do a lot of marketing. And governments so far are going more the route of just trying to force AirBnB to hand over listings directly, instead of buying from a third party.
Those numbers could also be a consequence of more people trying to rent out AirBnBs right? That’s always the biggest issue trusting host-reported occupancy rates.
I’d love for someone to do an analysis where they look at the number of AirBnB’s in a city, and model out what would happen to the rents in that city if those units were put back into the rental market.
Would be absolutely fascinating if there was a tight correlation
The statistic that "29% of rental inventory is being leased on AirBnB" is absurd. They're calculating it on the number of rentals that just happen to be unoccupied/available right now which makes no sense at all as a statistic.
C'mon mate you can't be for real, you can't just look at Airbnb data and make any conclusions about rent from that. They literally target different audiences.
I think its important to compare the AirBnB stock with the available stock of units, not entire stock. I would posit that rent is driven by marginal availability instead of total size of unit stock.
This is one of the best arguments I've seen recently supporting airbnb. However, I'd be curious to see how these numbers would be affected by removing all the undesirable airbnb arrangements - the ones where people are causing hell or even nuisances for their neighbors, the ones where people are turning long-term rental units into under-the-table short term rentals, etc.
The title is trying to imply that airbnbs outnumber apartments, but directly comparing airbnb listings with apartment listings doesn't really make sense. There's basically a one to one relationship between an airbnb listing and an apartment that's used for airbnb. On the other hand for every apartment listing there might be tens/hundreds of apartments being used as apartments (because an apartment that's occupied tends not to be listed). In a tight rental market, each apartment gets snatched up sooner, which exacerbates this. A far more honest representation would say how much housing units are in NY, and how much % of that are being used for short term rentals (eg. airbnb), but that gets you a mundane number (eg. 10%) rather than a shocking headline.
Fair enough, but airbnb wasn't the first to capitalize on the void in the market (for short term stay for cheap, non hostel), and nor will it be the last. It's not like these problems just appeared with airbnb, right?
And if we push the problems down the road, whats to stop a decentralized network where the listors profit even more with even less payout for negative externalities? Maybe in that case, listors assume more risk, but as it is now, I don't see property owners being proactive and mining listing sites for their properties. Illegal in some areas or not, the law moves too slow to appease the crowd. Hell, I even tried (I took down the website though, might open source it if enough interest) launching a SaaS app last year that did just that, and talked to some of my Real estate friends in NYC and here's the feedback one gave me from the landlords/managers she talked to:
"I spoke with 6 landlords and one real estate property manger and here's what I left with:
1. All the landlords with smaller portfolios agreed that there was no need for such a service, especially if they paid for it. They knew their buildings very well - and the doorman always kept them in the loop.
2. The property manager did not see a use for the service at all. He was actually a bit offended that I asked him about it, but he had a few good points:
- Buildings with property managers keep pretty good tabs on who is coming in and out of their building. Especially if there is a doorman. - He questioned how data on the website would be verified and felt that simply "pulling listings" from other websites was not enough. There are inaccurate listings all over the web - especially in NYC.
3. My personal thoughts are that you would need a dedicated team to verify and confirm air bnb services. Also, after they find out that someone is illegally subletting - what next? Does the website offer a solution? The landlords I spoke with typically used illegal subletting to charge their own tenant additional fees (like $100/day until the illegal subletter is out) so in the case someone is silly enough to do so - they can make money off of it."
The cognitive dissonance on one side in this market is telling me that if airbnb looses this battle, I should do something for the side of the market that is actually trying to solve their problems and pay for it. But, If you know a landlord or property manager that actually has this problem and wants to make money of trying to solve the problems arising because of the negative externalities rather than moan that government isn't doing enough, point me in their direction because I would love to talk more! Can reach me at my username here with gmail.
>it's actually 12,374 (65%) units that are listed as entire unit
I had filtered out the 3300 "Entire home/apt" listings that were available for 0 days a year. Not sure why it's part of the dataset, but I assume it's for people with previously active listings.
I'm not really understanding the mortgage point, but you bring up an interesting point of treating "multi-listing" hosts as bad actors. If we approximate it by saying 45% of 9550 are bad actors, that's still only 4300 listing. That's still tiny relative to the Toronto rental market. To be fair, the realistic number could be a lot lower since a multi-listing host might be hosting multiple bedrooms in a single house and inflating the # of multi-listing hosts, or they might be hosting their primary residence and an investment property where only the investment property is a bad actor.
>You say it's negligible but you have to remember that we have one of the lowest vacancy rates.
I don't deny that Airbnb has an adverse affect on rent prices, but it appears to be quite small relative to other levers affecting the housing crisis. I wonder if a study may exist that shows the economic benefits of Airbnb in communities, keeping more of the income within local residents, patronage to a larger spread of local businesses, greater financial independence from self-employment etc...
>just go on r/toronto
I'm pretty active in the community, but less and less these days. It's become a major echo chamber where fact based level headed discussion is quickly down voted if the rhetoric doesn't fit the majority's views. Just look at the comments the next time Airbnb is brought up :). In all seriousness, having an overwhelming majority of people agreeing with you isn't always indicative of "being correct". For any viewpoint, there's probably an active internet community out there that feels strongly one way. Take r/the_donald or r/The_Mueller/ for example.
First of all, appreciate the level headed discussion and some very sound points that you bring.
I dug through insideairbnb more and it's actually 12,374 (65%) units that are listed as entire unit in Toronto. That absolutely is a very significant amount of units. Only about 7k of the listings are either shared room/private room.
> Lets say anyone renting out their unit for less than half a year wouldn't have put the unit on the rental market anyways
See, that's a valid point though in Canada it is difficult to get a mortgage and there are people now buying a second unit to treat as an airbnb property and generate income. Chances are that if the unit is sitting idle for > 90 days and < 180 days, people might be forced to sell it. Sure not everyone but there will be units that will come to the market.
You say it's negligible but you have to remember that we have one of the lowest vacancy rates.
are you suggesting that the number of tourists and landlords combined is more than the number of people that disagree with housing units existing as permanent airbnb listings?
Of course, just like my rent is not pure profit for my building management company. The real question is, at what price were these units put up for rent on Airbnb, and how does it compare to market rents? The GA report says they cannot know because of the data anonymization.
Thanks for providing some real data behind the assumptions everyone has been making. I remember when AirBnB first started, it was definitely much more about people renting out spare bedrooms, in-laws, etc. but as it became more popular it was very clear to property owners that they could make more taking rental units off the market especially in markets with high nightly hotel rates like New York and San Francisco.
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