Monday, February 17, 2014

AirBnB laid it on a little too thick

From Gawker via Curbed:

Airbnb should have picked another place as the testing ground for its battle with regulators. Just as the sweetheart of the sharing economy prepares to face off with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a new study from Skift contradicts numbers reported by Airbnb.

The company claims that "87 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York share only the home in which they live." But when Skift used a data extraction firm to look at New York numbers from January, the results didn't always match up.
70% of the available inventory is represented by people who only have one listing, while 30% comes from users who have posted more than one listing. This is made up of a mix of either one listing owned or leased by the person listing it and one other unit, or people who are renting multiple spaces on behalf of themselves or others.

That 30% breaks down like this:

102 hosts have 7 or more listings on the site, representing a total of 1,237 available listings on the site.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This site is the Napster of lodging. Say what you will, the entire concept of renting will change as a result of their thinking.

Anonymous said...

If you live in a co-op or condo you do not want different strangers in your building every night of the week. Period!

Yo didn't buy shares in a hotel, you bought a home. No to airBNB! Keep them out of NYC!

Anonymous said...

Anon 2 if your co-op or condo doesn't want anyone staying over then pass a bylaw that doesn't permit guests. Or doesn't permit more than X guests per unit per year. Or only allow them if the owner of the unit is in the building at the same time. Or just forbid them from renting out their place, or part of it, on AirBnB and similar services. No need for the city to get involved and do your investigations for you.

Queens Crapper said...

And if your neighbor rents out his 3 family home as a hotel you do need the government to get involved.

Mateo Sydney said...

A lot of properties available on airbnb are just illegal sublets. The "owner" is perfectly willing to trust strangers with someone else's property, apparently.