Nice to see newspapers looking into Airbnb stats:
At The San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Said takes a thorough look into the data for that city. She followed up with a blog about my previous posts, here.
The Guardian looks at Airbnb in London here.
This after travel site Skift reposted my reports here and here.
Both The SF Chronicle and The Guardian’s data are consistent with mine, so we are all obviously finding the same pages from the Airbnb web site. There’s no doubt the newspapers have better ways to present some of the data, and of course they are looking at an individual city (so they do neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood drill-downs) while I’ve been looking across multiple cities. One nice thing about Carolyn Said’s piece is that she complements it with some interviews that give a peek into likely incentives and motives behind some of the patterns that the data show.
We are all limited by what information is publicly available. One additional piece of the puzzle was given when Airbnb executive Chip Conley wrote that 70% of guests leave reviews, which helps in the conversion of reviews into actual visits.
Question for those who have read this far. In many cities, the number of “whole home or apartment” listings is about a factor of two more than the number of “private room” listings (see below). But in Paris, the ratio is more like 5 to 1 and in London it’s about 1 to 1. What’s happening in these cities — particularly Paris? Any ideas, please add to the comments.
I have no data, so all this comes with lots of grains of salt.
Paris I’d tentatively suggest involves AirBnB creating a way around traditional regulation of rentals – so you’re seeing many more whole dwellings.
London – no idea – maybe something to do with the shortage of “entire homes”? Everyone is already sharing?
I hadn’t thought of the regulation differences. My guess was (also with grains of salt) that there’s probably a large existing practice of whole-home rental in Paris — people moving out over summer and renting perhaps? Like I know Edinburgh people do during the festival — and these people could easily transfer their activities onto Airbnb easily.