> Nearly half of all Canadian Airbnb revenue in 2018 was generated by commercial operators, or those who manage multiple listings, the McGill report said. Their share of sales increased from 2017 in nearly all metro areas. Among this group, there are some hosts that vastly eclipse the competition: Fifteen managed at least 100 active listings apiece in the past year, the report said, and nearly 60 hosts earned more than $1-million in 2018.
> It vastly differs from how Airbnb often pitches itself: as a personal platform through which residents, either out of town or looking to put a second bedroom to good use, will occasionally rent out their spaces.
> Often, the largest “hosts” are in fact businesses that manage vacation rentals on behalf of homeowners.
City of Vancouver regulations (as ineffective as they are) explicitly targeted and banned these sort of commercial operators.
What does Airbnb's valuation look like if such a significant share of their revenue comes from the sort of activity that is actively being banned by more and more cities?
I really wish my city would ban Airbnb with the exception being that you must reside in the household you are looking to rent out, as in, a literal bed and breakfast.
Our rental market is absolutely cut-throat right now. Affordable rentals on realtor.ca aren't lasting more than a couple days after they go up.
I would like to know if you think the problem is AirBnB or the lack of building new houses. I find a lot of people who complain AirBnB drives up rent, but also believe building more units won't push down rents.
Why should a city have the right to tell a house-owner what they can do with their house and what not? In order to satisfy other people who want to live in said city and want to pay less rent?
Are you ideologically against the right of private property in general, or only against the specific right to own houses?
I'm genuinely baffled that so few people in this thread see no value in Airbnb providing cheaper options for travelers. As a software engineer, one way I could advance my career would be to move back to the Bay Area. An imperfect substitute, though, is visiting regularly to maintain the relationships I built when I lived there. (Indeed, I'm writing this from a plane while flying there.) Being able to stay in an Airbnb for half the cost of the hotel makes that more feasible.
It's a mirror of the intracity highway issue. Access is improved for people who don't live in a specific location, and the externalities of this decision are dumped onto local citizens. The desirable location ends up hollowed-out, as no more geography is generated but instead the existing geography sliced away and allocated to visitors. They become destinations, more theme park than city.
It's well accepted that the highway boom of twentieth century had a negative impact on city life. That's why the Big Dig put that city-cutting highway underground in Boston, and (one reason) why the viaduct in Seattle is going underground, and why the I-93 corridor in Massachusetts became a public transit route instead. Here's a longer list:
Transforming private residences into hotel rooms makes it easier to visit and harder to live. Acknowledging this doesn't mean people don't like Airbnb, it just means that both the positive and the negative impacts of their business model are being discussed.
Kind of a double-edged sword. It makes it easier to visit, but more difficult to live there if you do land a job:
In New York, for instance, Airbnb directly accounted for a US$380 increase in median annual rent costs, according to a separate report from Prof. Wachsmuth last year that was funded, in part, by a hotel-industry organization.
Publish the actual paper or this is just vaporware nonsense. This is a non-peer-reviewed paper with zero credibility, thats been seen by a small handful of people. They could literally write a paper about the moon being made of cheese and have the same credibility. They dont even make the source material available in their article.
I dont want to sound overly critical, this looks like a legit finding that matches up with my experience of the housing market, but Im completely fed up with people publishing their "findings" without reporting where the data came from and how they got to their conclusions. Until they publish the paper, this should be dismissed out of hand. There's such a long history of people completely messing up their statistical methodology that you cant believe anything until you see the actual numbers/methods.
>Publish the actual paper or this is just vaporware nonsense.
Even without the data it's not non-sense. It's a pretty rational hypothesis. Being rational definitely doesn't make something right, but it's about as far away from non-sense as you can get.
The data they received is a competitive advantage and they are not under any obligation to publish it. You don't need to, or are allowed to, extend your demands of peer-reviewed academia to modern online journalism. Stop whining, and address the claims of the article.
>In the past, Prof. Wachsmuth has done consulting work and produced reports for governments, and civic and business groups, including a hotel-industry association. This study, which has been peer reviewed, was funded solely by the federal government, however.
This trend of professional Airbnb operators renting new condos as a business is part of the explanation for why land values in Toronto and Vancouver have spiked and distorted beyond local incomes.
A person can make substantially more money renting short term to a tourist than they can to a long term tenant, so accordingly the land valuation is less and less based on the underlying assumption of land being rented long term to a person that can only afford what a local income provides.
It's a huge issue in Ireland, too. Houses in Galway and Dublin are hard to come by partially (there are other factors, of course) because AirBnB operators can make more renting to the tourists for the summer than to locals for a year. With less to worry about, too (not to mention all the taxes they likely aren't paying). Furthermore, it also destroys the communities. See Barcelona for examples of that.
The same happened in London and I lived through it, saw this happening in my neighbourhood, but the thing is, nobody cares. Every single person I brought this up with dismissed it as a non issue.
Those flats on Airbnb have to come from somewhere and there are rental agencies that specialise in managing properties exclusively for Airbnb, none of this existed before and some of those properties were taken from the long let market, which would drive prices up.
It's a matter of scale. How much does AirBnB inflate price versus overly restrictive zoning and NIMBY laws? AirBnB is just easier to rail against because it's a private company.
If only we had some technology that could increase the number of housing units on a given piece of land; such a technology could allow us to build as much housing as people want to occupy.
You don’t even need elevators. In most cities it’s possible to build and maintain small concrete rooms in a single story structure with an exterior wall and make a profit renting them out for less than ~$40/month. The issues come from zoning, rent seeking, and regulation.
Thoughts:
1) It's just basic free-market supply and demand. Landlords own property to make money, so if they want to take a risk in short term rentals they should be able to.
2) I would love to live in a double-wide shipping container... actually that's probably bigger than what I have now.
People rarely discuss the positive impact of AirBnB: boosting the number of tourists. I wonder how much additional tourism spend and tax revenue the city is getting from the influx of tourists. Hotels aren't closing down; AirBnB's just make traveling easier.
Is an increase in tourists really a positive impact? Sure, they bring more money to the city, but there's lots of downsides to it as well, especially when they stay in AirBnBs. See Barcelona, for example.
For the record, I'd almost say increased tourism in most places isn't a net positive.
It's interesting to see how the Airbnb market has evolved. I used to always hear that "Airbnb is cheaper", but lately when booking trips I've been able to find better deals in hotels.
What will happen when the market contracts and people don't travel much? I know a couple in Canada that have acquired 7 homes in the last few years strictly for Airbnb rentals.
The numbers have to be seen in relation to 250.000 immigrants (2012) that occupy a larger amount of flats each year. Also this pool of AirBnb flats offers flexibility for people who didn’t find a long term apartement yet and home owners who want to reshape these homes.
The number of immigrants admitted to Canada per year is very stable and only slowing rising. On average it has been between 200-300 thousand per year for at least the past 20 years. This is not the driving force of lack of housing, and is a driving force of a stronger economy with the introduction of skilled labour.
I've had mostly negative experiences with Airbnb over the years.
My neighbors airbnb their house every weekend. So nice loud music and rude guests to deal with fairly often. Of course why not? They are not accountable to rest of us full timers in my neighborhood.
My place was broken into by someone who stayed at it before using Airbnb.
One guest almost started a fire and had to be removed.
Checking in and out of airbnbs can be a bit of a nightmare. Everyone has their own process for checkin.
Airbnb destroying local real estate markets is no surprise. They've been doing it for several years and getting in trouble for it for several years.
Growth at all costs - no matter what it does to local markets or people's lives. I'm sure their impact on local economies is the least of their concern until the governments attached to those economies start to speak up.
I live next to an Airbnb that constantly has new people coming through and occasionally some music and I don’t have any problem with it. None of my neighbours have complained either and I know quite a few of them in the 3yrs I’ve lived here.
I guess your experience may vary depending on what type of place you have and what type of owner of the unit. It’s really not hard to filter out the idiots with the review system.
The people who I have met waiting for the elevator were always super polite when I see them and our walls are thick enough with concrete where I don’t hear the music unless I’m close to my living room wall, which is far from my bedroom.
The owner of the unit, an older retiree from the area with just the one unit AFAIK, was very polite and open about it too and gave me his number in case I had any problems (which I’ve never used). But 99% of them seem to be European or Chinese travellers, who at most occasionally need some help with our complicated fob system. It’s only rarely young people who are partying and if it is it’s always the weekend where I’m more tolerant.
Plus I’ll never forget how Airbnb saved me when I flew into SF last minute as a 20yr old and the only option was a $500 hotel or not sleeping that night, because my prior arrangement with someone fell through when they were unexpectedly out of town. I was fortunate to find an Airbnb guy who accepted my request at 9pm after I got out of the BART with a dying phone. I was literally preparing to spend the night in a park with my luggage. So I’m a bit biased regarding Airbnb and the alternate options without it (which no one seems to offer or care about in their calls to ban it).
As a counter-point, I lived in AirBnBs for over two years in places ranging from Morocco to France to Bulgaria, and had an almost universally positive experience.
It's long term renters that increase the probability of issues/squatting/ill-maintenance cropping up, and generally start a long term degradation of the neighborhood. Long term renters also seem to buy ridiculously overpowered audio systems, and run them in such a way that one can hear the thump-thump bass, a block away. Not to mention they often pack like sardines into a place, and then you have 4 or 5 autos per residence.
If property owners can make more money renting out properties on Airbnb, that suggests short term rentals are the highest value use of that property. I derive a lot of value from using Airbnb when I travel, particularly in markets with housing shortages. If an apartment can host a hundred visitors a year, is that obviously worse for the city than renting it out to a single person?
>that suggests short term rentals are the highest value use of that property.
that's undeniably true for all property in most places that have any tourism value, but it's a short-term value akin to "if we light this city on fire, we can probably make a lot of money selling tickets to watch it".
People also have to live in the city for it to have any value as a tourism destination. If an apartment can host a hundred visitors a year but there's no service industry staff living within 50km because all their houses have been converted to AirBnB's, your tourism industry is going to collapse.
I think the main issue is that there are laws related to hotels and there are laws around renting/leasing and there are laws around owning houses. The "short term rental" category gets to bypass all these regulations and that is the exclusive source of their margins. Once government constructs rules around short term rentals, the advantage goes away. It is also interesting that the focus of these discussions is never really balanced. It is always why it is bad for home owners or would be renters OR exclusively why it is great for consumers who get to pay less, etc. These things are complicated and it will take slow governments more time to adapt to the changed world.
rental market is a distortion anyway, things are foobar because ownership is getting harder and harder, creating a whole generation of renters-for-life, but the solution lies not in affordable rents, it's affordable housing where is at.
I always wonder why the same argument isn't applied to hotel rooms. If the government forced every hotel room to be converted to affordable housing, the homelessness problem could be solved overnight!
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|6 years ago|reply
> It vastly differs from how Airbnb often pitches itself: as a personal platform through which residents, either out of town or looking to put a second bedroom to good use, will occasionally rent out their spaces.
> Often, the largest “hosts” are in fact businesses that manage vacation rentals on behalf of homeowners.
City of Vancouver regulations (as ineffective as they are) explicitly targeted and banned these sort of commercial operators.
What does Airbnb's valuation look like if such a significant share of their revenue comes from the sort of activity that is actively being banned by more and more cities?
[+] [-] eljimmy|6 years ago|reply
Our rental market is absolutely cut-throat right now. Affordable rentals on realtor.ca aren't lasting more than a couple days after they go up.
[+] [-] dkhenry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parthdesai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] radiator|6 years ago|reply
Are you ideologically against the right of private property in general, or only against the specific right to own houses?
[+] [-] mrosett|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarcher|6 years ago|reply
It's well accepted that the highway boom of twentieth century had a negative impact on city life. That's why the Big Dig put that city-cutting highway underground in Boston, and (one reason) why the viaduct in Seattle is going underground, and why the I-93 corridor in Massachusetts became a public transit route instead. Here's a longer list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
Transforming private residences into hotel rooms makes it easier to visit and harder to live. Acknowledging this doesn't mean people don't like Airbnb, it just means that both the positive and the negative impacts of their business model are being discussed.
[+] [-] edoloughlin|6 years ago|reply
In New York, for instance, Airbnb directly accounted for a US$380 increase in median annual rent costs, according to a separate report from Prof. Wachsmuth last year that was funded, in part, by a hotel-industry organization.
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lykr0n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wedn3sday|6 years ago|reply
Publish the actual paper or this is just vaporware nonsense. This is a non-peer-reviewed paper with zero credibility, thats been seen by a small handful of people. They could literally write a paper about the moon being made of cheese and have the same credibility. They dont even make the source material available in their article.
I dont want to sound overly critical, this looks like a legit finding that matches up with my experience of the housing market, but Im completely fed up with people publishing their "findings" without reporting where the data came from and how they got to their conclusions. Until they publish the paper, this should be dismissed out of hand. There's such a long history of people completely messing up their statistical methodology that you cant believe anything until you see the actual numbers/methods.
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
The lead author has said that the paper will be available for download tomorrow: https://twitter.com/dwachsmuth/status/1141665262065860608
The G&M article says it's a peer-reviewed study and fully funded by the federal government, so the likelihood of moon cheese methodology is low.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gerbilly|6 years ago|reply
All right, all right, perhaps we can we have some respect for other professions around here?
You know the human world isn't the robot world, it's not built on 'data' it's built on relationships, agreements and good faith.
[+] [-] kadendogthing|6 years ago|reply
Even without the data it's not non-sense. It's a pretty rational hypothesis. Being rational definitely doesn't make something right, but it's about as far away from non-sense as you can get.
[+] [-] itsaidpens|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bongobongo|6 years ago|reply
>In the past, Prof. Wachsmuth has done consulting work and produced reports for governments, and civic and business groups, including a hotel-industry association. This study, which has been peer reviewed, was funded solely by the federal government, however.
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|6 years ago|reply
A person can make substantially more money renting short term to a tourist than they can to a long term tenant, so accordingly the land valuation is less and less based on the underlying assumption of land being rented long term to a person that can only afford what a local income provides.
[+] [-] dorchadas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9387367|6 years ago|reply
Those flats on Airbnb have to come from somewhere and there are rental agencies that specialise in managing properties exclusively for Airbnb, none of this existed before and some of those properties were taken from the long let market, which would drive prices up.
[+] [-] ng12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jseliger|6 years ago|reply
Too bad this has to remain a fantasy. https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/urban-sprawl-housin...
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RocketSyntax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorchadas|6 years ago|reply
For the record, I'd almost say increased tourism in most places isn't a net positive.
[+] [-] jumbopapa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lixtra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbyT314|6 years ago|reply
https://www.statista.com/statistics/443063/number-of-immigra...
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
- Crappy local policy prevents creation of 300,000 housing units: nobody panicks.
- Startup removes 30,000 housing units from the market: everyone loses their mind!
[+] [-] fjabre|6 years ago|reply
My neighbors airbnb their house every weekend. So nice loud music and rude guests to deal with fairly often. Of course why not? They are not accountable to rest of us full timers in my neighborhood.
My place was broken into by someone who stayed at it before using Airbnb.
One guest almost started a fire and had to be removed.
Checking in and out of airbnbs can be a bit of a nightmare. Everyone has their own process for checkin.
Airbnb destroying local real estate markets is no surprise. They've been doing it for several years and getting in trouble for it for several years.
Growth at all costs - no matter what it does to local markets or people's lives. I'm sure their impact on local economies is the least of their concern until the governments attached to those economies start to speak up.
[+] [-] dmix|6 years ago|reply
I guess your experience may vary depending on what type of place you have and what type of owner of the unit. It’s really not hard to filter out the idiots with the review system.
The people who I have met waiting for the elevator were always super polite when I see them and our walls are thick enough with concrete where I don’t hear the music unless I’m close to my living room wall, which is far from my bedroom.
The owner of the unit, an older retiree from the area with just the one unit AFAIK, was very polite and open about it too and gave me his number in case I had any problems (which I’ve never used). But 99% of them seem to be European or Chinese travellers, who at most occasionally need some help with our complicated fob system. It’s only rarely young people who are partying and if it is it’s always the weekend where I’m more tolerant.
Plus I’ll never forget how Airbnb saved me when I flew into SF last minute as a 20yr old and the only option was a $500 hotel or not sleeping that night, because my prior arrangement with someone fell through when they were unexpectedly out of town. I was fortunate to find an Airbnb guy who accepted my request at 9pm after I got out of the BART with a dying phone. I was literally preparing to spend the night in a park with my luggage. So I’m a bit biased regarding Airbnb and the alternate options without it (which no one seems to offer or care about in their calls to ban it).
[+] [-] Veen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfsfsf6666|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpollock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncphillips|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrosett|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
that's undeniably true for all property in most places that have any tourism value, but it's a short-term value akin to "if we light this city on fire, we can probably make a lot of money selling tickets to watch it".
People also have to live in the city for it to have any value as a tourism destination. If an apartment can host a hundred visitors a year but there's no service industry staff living within 50km because all their houses have been converted to AirBnB's, your tourism industry is going to collapse.
[+] [-] momokoko|6 years ago|reply
Real estate isn't really that controlled by market forces. Its a means to an end and pricing does not actually represent best utility.
[+] [-] snarf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bparsons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yifanl|6 years ago|reply
AirBnB properties were originally zoned for long-term housing and operate as not-long-term housing.
[+] [-] xutopia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parthdesai|6 years ago|reply