Crunching the Numbers: Airbnb’s Effect on Rental Markets

2 minute read

Are Airbnb rentals negatively affecting the overall apartment rental market in certain cities? That question has been debated since the origins of the company, with little public data to back up either side of the argument.

Now, the data-driven website FiveThirtyEight has found that while full-time, whole-unit listings—known as commercial listings—are currently a small percentage of total Airbnb listings, the company derives a disproportionate amount of its revenue from them. Therefore, the company has a financial incentive to increase these listings, which could eventually affect tight rental markets.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed data from Airdna, which the consulting firm scraped from Airbnb from June 2015 to May 2016, finding that Airbnb had almost 9,000 commercial listings in its 25 largest U.S. markets. Commercial listings account for 9.7 percent of the total listings in those markets, but almost a third of host revenue.

Cities with commercial listings at higher than 10 percent include Honolulu (21.1 percent); Portland, Oregon (15.6 percent); and Los Angeles (15.5 percent). Commercial listings accounted for 46.4 percent of host revenue in Los Angeles; 45.0 percent in Honolulu; and 40.8 percent in Portland. Commercial listings made up at least 20 percent of host revenue in all of the site’s top 25 markets.

However, the raw number of commercial listings in each city is not currently a large percentage of overall rentals. For example, in Airbnb’s largest market, New York City, 2,500 listings are commercial, but the city has about 2.2 million rental units.

But just as the total number of listings on Airbnb has grown each year since 2009, so has the number of commercial listings.

“I’m not convinced it’s that big a deal yet,” said George McCarthy, president of the think tank Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, “but the growth rate would be of concern.”

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To get a fuller picture of how Airbnb continues to effect the apartment industry, see two of our past units magazine features, "Allow Airbnb? The Residents Speak," and "Airbnb: Here to Stay?"