
Inside Airbnb: New York City - clsec
http://insideairbnb.com/
======
nostromo
New York has 3.4 million housing units and Airbnb only has 13,415 highly
available, entire unit listings. Is Airbnb really to blame for rising rents,
or are people just looking for a scapegoat?

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/housing/assets/downloads/pdf/housing...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/housing/assets/downloads/pdf/housing_plan.pdf)

It seems to me that if New York wants to reduce rents, they should build more
housing.

~~~
varunjuice
I think its important to compare the AirBnB stock with the available stock of
units, not entire stock. I would posit that rent is driven by marginal
availability instead of total size of unit stock.

~~~
vonklaus
Yet marginal availability __is __driven by total unit stock.

~~~
varunjuice
Is it? Driven is a strong word. It suggests significant causality.

~~~
vonklaus
You don't think availability is driven by supply?

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practicalpants
I like AirBnB a lot, but the whole marketing it as a community thing just
seems... weird, and a little disingenuous.

Granted I've only stayed in entire-appt bookings, but every single one of them
has been run by a real estate person(s)/ entrepreneur managing multiple
properties, who does not actually live there, and all of them have some self
check-in so you never meet the person. It's really nothing more than a rev
stream for these "hosts." I've been doing a lot of AirBnBs in Tokyo currently,
and it's especially heinous here, like trying to up sell you on other stuff,
or trying to justify a crappy, cheap bed because "it's factored into the
price."

I just don't know about AirBnB's whole 'community' angle.

~~~
varunjuice
I think they can build a lot of ways in which the "community" angle adds value
to a guest.

For example, they could encourage hosts to provide a list of top 3 things to
do / eat / see, and aggregate this for guests.

Based on a guest's FB profile, they could suggest neighborhoods where they
would enjoy staying, or connect guests to hosts who share similar interests.

There is so much potential, and I won't hold the current lack of community
oriented benefits against them. Startups put a stake in the ground, and then
build towards it.

~~~
practicalpants
AirBnB is fine how it is now (for me), I'm pretty indifferent to the
'community' aspect... It's just funny (and, well, dishonest) that they market
it like it's so community oriented. Maybe it was community oriented before,
but it is literally inundated with profit-seeking power users renting multiple
apartments solely to tourists (no actual residents).

That facet is incompatible with 'community.' Forcing them to recommend stuff
isn't community, but it is a nice perk.

Granted not everyone is like that on AirBnB, I'm sure there is much more
community for shared apartments where you are living with travelers... but for
whole apartments I would venture the large majority at this point are these
profit seeking/multi property/ no residents types.

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cauterized
These are the externalities of a business model like AirBnB. It's great to be
able to rent out your apartment for a few weeks while you go on vacation. But
people are now buying up multiple apartments to rent to tourists instead of
residents, and that reduces housing availability for residents are drives up
prices further in an already painful market.

~~~
cynicalkane
That's not really an externality, that's a market equilibrium. New York
housing is very scarce, and you should beware of economic thinking that
arbitrarily assigns scarce resources to certain people. Everyone has a right
to a place to live, not everyone has a right to a place to live in the most
in-demand parts of America.

An externality would be something like if AirBnB guests were a major nuisance
to other people and there was no market solution to this problem. It's true
that AirBnB guests and renters are often violating housing agreements and
local regulations, but I'm not actually convinced the harm of this, to the
extent it even exists, outweighs the economic benefit of more people being
able to travel to New York--one thing that is clear is NYC hotels are too few
and too expensive.

~~~
chimeracoder
I'm confused by the juxtaposition of these two arguments:

> That's not really an externality, that's a market equilibrium. New York
> housing is very scarce, and you should beware of economic thinking that
> arbitrarily assigns scarce resources to certain people. Everyone has a right
> to a place to live, not everyone has a right to a place to live in the most
> in-demand parts of America.

and

> one thing that is clear is NYC hotels are too few and too expensive.

It's particularly baffling because there is _much_ greater flexibility around
choice with temporary lodging than permanent lodging on a wide number of axes
(location, comfort, cleanliness, etc.).

As for your other argument:

> An externality would be something like if AirBnB guests were a major
> nuisance to other people and there was no market solution to this problem.

If my neighbors are renting out their apartment on AirBNB, and their guests
are a continual nuisance, what is the "market solution" to my problem? If I
complain to the guests or the tenants listing the unit, there's a good chance
that they won't listen. The only other person I could complain to is the
landlord, and _if_ the landlord does decide to pull their lease, that's
recourse that they're only able to take because the tenants are breaking the
law[0] - a law that was put in place specifically because of this externality.

A "market solution" might be if AirBNB allowed _neighbors_ to rate rentals on
AirBNB, but that's a feature I would be very surprised if they ever added[2].

[0] The fact that they are breaking the terms of the lease does not inherently
give the landlord the right to break the lease, but the fact that they are
breaking the law may.

[1] The history of tenant rights is pretty well-studied and documented, and
there's a reason that virtually every jurisdiction in the US places
restrictions of some sort on temporary lodging.

[2] And frankly, I'm not sure it would do much good anyway, because the people
reading those ratings would be the guests, the very people causing the issues
in the first place.

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michaelbuckbee
Until I saw the map, I just hadn't realized the insane size of AirBnb.

These numbers are pretty rough due to things like suites vs multi room
apartment listings, etc. but:

\- They're listing about the same number of rooms as the 30 largest hotels in
NYC combined.

\- NYC only has about 70,000 rooms total, so AirBnb is fast approaching half
as many rooms as NYC Hotels total.

Stats from:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hotels_in_New_York_City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hotels_in_New_York_City)

~~~
ryanwanger
If the rentals number in the search results is correct, Boulder, CO has 1,864
listings on Airbnb. The population is somewhere around 104,000 people, with
around 42,000 households.

That is insane.

Not sure how many hotel rooms there are, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's
about 1/3rd the number of Airbnb listings.

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dotBen
While it's great that Murray Cox has made the data 'Public Domain' I'm sure
AirBnB would probably have a different view as to whether he is in a position
to decide such a license upon scraped data from the AirBnB site.

[http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html](http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-
data.html)

Including property reviews (written by 3rd parties) as a Public Domain data-
set seems pretty clear-cut inappropriate - in the same way that it's no ok or
legal to crawl Yelp.com, compile a data set of reviews and deem them 'Public
Domain' for anyone to use a they see fit.

I mention all of this because this kind of abuse of the concept of Public
Domain harms its reputation and also puts fellow community members in
difficulty if they go to incorporate this "Public Domain" dataset and later
run into legal issues with the original rights holder.

I assume most HN users are firm supporters in the true concept of "Public
Domain" and thus I hope the community will call out improper and harmful miss-
interpretation of the concept.

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tibbon
NYC's real estate is hard for me to understand. As of 2004, I was able to get
a cheap/ugly hotel room 2 blocks from Central Park for $90/night. Fast forward
through a recession and housing crisis and I can't seem to find a room in a
hotel OR airBnB for under $150/night. How demand has gone up that much in that
time period is beyond me. Even 3 years ago I was able to find AirBnB's in
midtown for like $120/night, and now they seem much higher on average.

It appears that there is essentially infinite demand to push prices up.

~~~
curun1r
Overseas investors, especially Chinese, have targeted specific housing markets
around the world and have pushed up prices in those areas. I'm in SF and we've
seen basically the same thing...1 BRs are creeping toward $1m at the moment.
Anyone who's tried to buy in any of these markets is well aware of having to
compete with these all-cash offers for well over asking.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/realestate/wealthy-
chinese...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/realestate/wealthy-chinese-
buyers-head-to-new-yorks-suburbs.html)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/25/us-realestate-
chin...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/25/us-realestate-china-
manhattan-insight-idUSBREA3O0TL20140425)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-all-cash-buyers-in-
us...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-all-cash-buyers-in-us-
housing-2014-7)

~~~
usaar333
Why would that drive AirBnB prices up? If anything, I'd expect it to drive
rental prices down because there would be fewer owner-occupied units and more
rental units as investors rent out.

As one example, Vancouver, notorious for huge amounts of international money
buying up property, has relatively cheap AirBnb units

~~~
mthoms
>As one example, Vancouver, notorious for huge amounts of international money
buying up property, has relatively cheap AirBnb units

Genuinely curious - is this something that someone has proven (i.e. is there
data somewhere to support this)? Or is it more of a personal observation?
Thanks.

~~~
usaar333
Just observation; sadly Vancouver doesn't have zillow - not sure what a good
equivalent is.

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paulmillr
The legality part is interesting. If it's "illegal", but widely used, it makes
the regulation wrong, not people, does it?

~~~
uptown
While it may imply that there's a non-trivial amount of public support to
overturn the existing legislation, it doesn't inherently make the regulation
"wrong".

------
syllogism
> New York City is a city of renters, yet despite its high stock of rent
> regulated housing, in 2015, rents continue to rise.

Most economists do not agree that rent control is a useful way to maintain
housing affordability: [http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-
panel/poll-re...](http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-
results?SurveyID=SV_6upyzeUpI73V5k0)

I don't see any real support here for the assumption that Air B'n'B is having
a negative impact.

~~~
varunjuice
Anecdotal evidence here. The last person renting the apartment I rent in NYC
didn't live in the apartment. She was renting it as two units on AirBnB (and
lived in different building). She was kicked out when the landlord discovered
it, and we were lucky to grab it.

If at all, this proves that long term rental units are being rented on Airbnb.
This might not drive rent but drives availability of units.

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javiercr
It's interesting that they used "classic" web scrapping while they could just
use their JSON API (just use Charles Proxy when using their mobile app and the
API is exposed).

[http://insideairbnb.com/behind.html](http://insideairbnb.com/behind.html)

[https://github.com/tomslee/airbnb/blob/master/airbnb.py](https://github.com/tomslee/airbnb/blob/master/airbnb.py)

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jsc123
Is there a way to translate a listing to a particular building? I tried using
InsideAirbnb's data, but had no luck:
[https://jsc.cartodb.com/tables/official/map](https://jsc.cartodb.com/tables/official/map)

~~~
jim_greco
I spot checked the ones on the map that corresponded with my building and it
checked out. Handy...

~~~
jsc123
I know this is unrelated but I had read about your company earlier this week,
and was really impressed. Looking forward to hearing more about you guys!!!

~~~
jim_greco
Thanks!

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lisa_henderson
The overwhelming majority of the ones that I checked were marked as "high
availability". Demand outruns supply, in the tourist capitol of the world?
Does that mean prices are too high? Or does it mean that AirBnB has to go
fully mainstream?

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garethsprice
There may be some bugs in the aggregation of multiple listings - checked a
friend's apartment (who definitely only has a single listing) and it says she
has "1 other listing".

Interesting data though.

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lordbusiness
Airbnb is targeted at tourism, and passersby. End of discussion. It has zero
effect on long-term apartment rental. The only 'disruption' this is causing is
to the rip-off merchants in the old-school hospitality industry, who have been
gouging tourists since time immemorial.

This kind of nonsense is almost guaranteed to be backed by big business hotel
chains.

In response, I will double down on my commitment to spend time in more
Airbnbs, and not at hotels.

~~~
ztnewman
Any sources on your wildly baseless claims?

~~~
lordbusiness
Nope, but from what I can tell from data analytics such as presented, this
doesn't set me apart from anyone else. :-)

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bkeroack
If there was no rent control/stabilization artificially limiting housing
supply, AirBNB would not be an issue. A big part of the "problem" is simple
arbitrage between very cheap subsidized rents and prices the tourist market
can bear.

~~~
warfangle
Rent control is moot, there are less than 1000 rent controlled units, and as
their tenants leave they cease to be rent controlled.

Without rent stabilization, even with a decent job in tech, I would be
commuting 2 hours each way (or sharing a 2 bedroom apartment with 5 other
people) instead of 35 minutes.

If rent reflected current building sale trends in my neighborhood, my rent
would be increasing >60% year over year.

~~~
bkeroack
"If rent reflected current building sale trends in my neighborhood, my rent
would be increasing >60% year over year."

OK, sure that would suck for you, but it's what the market is doing.
Artificial price ceilings restrict supply and create arbitrage opportunities.
Living in Manhattan is not a human right.

~~~
warfangle
I live 35 minutes away from Manhattan (on a good day) in Brooklyn, on the
border of Queens. Is your conjecture that rent stabilization drives rent
prices up confirmed by anything but randroidian theory?

I have a feeling that luxury units laying vacant, purchased in a cash-only
private deal, do more to drive up the price of housing than rent
stabilization.

That, by the way, is a vast majority of investment in new housing stock in
NYC. Some buildings cut a deal with the city to get tax breaks for providing
20% of the units as stabilized.

If rent were fully deregulated: good luck finding someone willing to travel
three hours to work in a midtown office for peanuts (or, for that matter, in
any job other than finance).

Do you have any non speculative examples of full deregulation actually
increasing the stock of affordable, safe, up-to-code housing in a growing
city?

