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Because there are so many more listings now, Airbnb hosts say they are watching their bookings plummet. The flood of new hosts has meant fewer can earn good money. “Now, the markets are completely oversaturated,” says Melody Wright, founder of mortgage strategy and technology company Huringa.

Depends on your definition of “plummet.” The market for the place in Mesa did soften last year and our rentals were off some 20%. We cut the rent about 10% as well. Even so, the place made 2X what it would rent for as a furnished apartment and offered guests a two bedroom apartment at less than the cost of a local motel room.

“Markets”, as used here, needs a bit of definition as well. Some markets (Mesa, others), are indeed saturating but certainly some markets (NE Ohio, Jersey City) are not. The savvy investor keeps track of such things and reacts accordingly. If I were 20 years younger I’d be snapping up NYC-adjacent properties in NJ. The ban on AirBnbs in NYC didn’t cut demand and instead will move it out of the city. If the neighborhood where we’re staying is any indication, a bit of gentrification won’t hurt a bit and the city looks like it could use some additional revenue.

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Meanwhile, excess supply hasn’t led to lower prices, and anecdotes about bad Airbnb experiences keep pouring in.

“Pouring”, you say? How about a cite, and while you’re at it do some real work and generate a chart showing complaints as a percentage of rentals. I daresay you’ll find the percentage vanishingly small - places with bad reviews don’t get rented. AirBnB also keeps track of complaints and will ban you from the platform if you generate a lot of them - especially sensational ones like cameras in bedrooms.

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Some of the most vocal grievances center on cleaning fees. In the US, only 15 percent of Airbnb listings don’t have cleaning fees, and a NerdWallet analysis found that cleaning fees now make up about a quarter of the total price guests pay.

We charge what it costs to clean the house as a fixed cost pass-through. It helps cut down on 2 night tenants (our minimum - 1 night tenants look too much like parties) and becomes a better deal the longer you stay. Hotels charge cleaning fees too - they’re just built in to the room rent. Our cleaning fee is starting to look better now that so many hotels have stopped cleaning rooms every day.

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For both the guest and the host, it’s just not a good value proposition anymore,” says Wright. The only one winning, it seems, is Airbnb.

Nonsense.

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Take somewhere like Missoula, Montana,” says Wright. The small city of about 77,000 people had 60 homeless encampments as of August 2022, while the state has seen a 62 percent increase in homelessness since 2019. “Missoula never had a homeless situation, not like this,” Wright says. The median listing for a home is now over $600,000 there.

The proposal appears to be that if the median price in Missoula was $300K then homeless people would buy them. Really?

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When Airbnb rolled out, everybody thought it was going to kill hotels,” says Lambert. “And it really just became hotels.”

Fair enough. Better hotels to be sure, but the function is the same.

Using that logic, then, repurposing high rise hotels in Manhattan as SRO long term rentals might be just the ticket for reducing rents in the city. There seem to be a lot of them - certainly more on a room-by-room basis than AirBnbs.

Perhaps Ms. Kim will weigh in on this proposal in the near future.

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https://www.epi.org/publicatio...ulatory-obligations/

This is a much better analysis, and while I’d take exception to some of what is in it, I don’t have a problem with it overall.

This statement is a bit off, however:

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Airbnb, founded in 2008, makes money by charging guests and hosts for short-term rental stays in private homes or apartments booked through the Airbnb website.

Not really. AirBnB makes their money by charging for their advertising and accounting service. They don’t actually charge guests anything unless you want to include costs passed through in the rental rate.

Like Uber, actually - another disruptive web service that generates many of the same complaints that AirBnB does.

I’ve really enjoyed thinking about all of this, WTG. It’s particularly timely as we’re on our last day at an Airbnb.

Thanks for posting it!

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I’ve really enjoyed thinking about all of this, WTG.

And I'm enjoying reading about it!

I've never actually stayed in an AirBnB (I'm not much of a traveler to begin with) but when we were in transit this summer trying to move across several states and having a gap between when we sold our house and when our rental became available, I looked for AirBnB options. Ultimately, I didn't find any that I thought were reasonable and not super, super overpriced, so we stayed in a hotel for ... maybe seven days, I don't recall now.

Anyway that's been my only experience with AirBnBs so far, but I imagine we'll use them at some point.

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Originally posted by Steve Miller:

quote:

Take somewhere like Missoula, Montana,” says Wright. The small city of about 77,000 people had 60 homeless encampments as of August 2022, while the state has seen a 62 percent increase in homelessness since 2019. “Missoula never had a homeless situation, not like this,” Wright says. The median listing for a home is now over $600,000 there.

The proposal appears to be that if the median price in Missoula was $300K then homeless people would buy them. Really?

I think it’s more of a rental issue. Turning a place into an airbnb means there are fewer long term rentals available for lower income people who live and work in these towns - leading to an increase in homelessness. The popularity of Montana towns like Missoula and Bozeman have led to a huge increase in housing prices, which has also contributed. Bozeman has just passed a ban on type 3 short term rentals - the kind that are not owner occupied. They grandfathered in the ones that already exist. It is really difficult to find affordable rentals in these towns, not sure if this will help.

I doubt banning AirBnbs will have much effect on the low cost rental market but perhaps I’m wrong. I’ll check back in a year or two to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, if you really want to increase the supply of low cost rental property you’re going to have to build it, which will probably require subsidies funded by taxpayers.

These projects are a tough sell. If people don’t like AirBnbs in their neighborhoods they’re going to like a Section 8 apartment building even less, and they surely won’t like being asked to pay for it.

One thing to consider is that AirBnbs tend to work a lot better for groups of people than for couples. The properties tend to be larger and amenities like kitchens and laundries are very useful to those traveling with kids.

Although we have never had difficulty finding smaller places when we travel...

And we have also found bigger places for family gatherings.

Our experiences have been mostly positive with responsive owners. The only weird one was a smaller one without a microwave!

How can you not have a small microwave in a house these days, rental or otherwise?