
Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement - minimaxir
https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-announces-confidential-submission-of-draft-registration-statement/
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dbt00
Just to preempt most of the usual snarky comments --

What's confidential is the contents of the filing, not the fact.

All the initial S-1 filings I'm aware of are confidential. After amendments
(S-1A filings), the resulting document can be made public. At this time, any
details of offering are still volatile, and there's no reason to force
companies to publish that information until the final offering details are
solid.

~~~
vmception
In all of my sales I have modified the offering midstream after feedback from
investors that jumped through hoops to see how to invest and balked at the
numbers. All advisors I've ever had all completely missed the mark about what
the market is interested in and what a good deal looks like. And then after
modifying its published publicly and that's the only record of what the terms
ever were. In the public's mind we never mispriced or raised or lowered based
on demand.

Confidential S-1's are perfect for that same result.

~~~
ponker
All of your sales? Have you founded multiple public companies or are you an
investment banker or something?

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mancerayder
Here's another bear argument: the political tide is turning against them.

Lisbon and New York are just some of the cities that have made AirBNB more
difficult. New York has made even a listing advertisement illegal if it's for
a short-term (under 30 days) timeframe. Paris forced registrations and taxing
some years back, which slashes the number of properties available. Politicians
in Brooklyn constantly evoked AirBNB these past few years in gentrifying
neighborhoods. Barcelona has had protests.

In an era of affordable housing becoming an issue, someone profiting off of
short term sublets at the expense of longer-term residents (who have to deal
with noise issues in addition to more scarcity of housing) will be targeted
politically. Will COVID and the move from the cities offset that?

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bogomipz
What action has Lisbon taken recently? I hadn't heard this until now.

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mancerayder
They're market-friendly actions but there's still a political response:
[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/in-europe-
covid-19-i...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/in-europe-covid-19-is-
an-opportunity-to-regulate-airbnb.html)

edit: Basically they're offering landlords incentives to rent to the city
which rents to workers and students. The article says that's 2000 apartments
off the AirBNB (or "short term") platforms. That's some serious revenue.

Other cities and countries are also mentioned in this article, which is a few
days old. It seems cities are taking advantage of the pandemic to pull housing
back from AirBNB. The bear thesis gets stronger.

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mancerayder
I'm upset, after using the platform for a decade, that they remove negative
reviews of properties. I learned this recently. That included some of my very
tame and reasonable reviews.

Makes me want to short the stock when it IPOs, after its initial run-up out of
vengeance.

~~~
asdff
Another dark pattern is hiding the price until you are nearly booking the
place. Most people want a cheap stay close to where they need to be, so they
look on the prices on the map, which fail to include fees which can be all
over the place depending on the host.

~~~
subsubzero
And the fees can be extreme. I recently tried to book a place before covid and
the cleaning fees etc ended up being $400. I feel like this is a scheme
landlords on airbnb are perpetrating which are similar to what used to go down
on ebay years ago.

For ebay they did not take a cut of the shipping cost(typically their cut was
around 10% of the final sale of an item) so sellers would list items at rock
bottom prices but with shipping like 5x of what it should be so they could
receive a maximum amount of money. I assume airbnb does not take a cut of
cleaning costs?

~~~
hellotomyrars
Some Ebay sellers still engage in this type of behavior and it's infuriating.
Also sellers who use USPS but still won't ship to a PO BOX. I don't get it.

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analyst74
I heard that Airbnb's business is actually stronger in US and Europe now than
pre-pandemic, as tourism shifts towards local and people shy away from hotels.

On the other hand, they're still in money saving mode, reducing ad spending
and laying people off.

Anyone know what is going on?

~~~
syshum
Another big factor in Airbnb, like other "platforms" like this vs their
traditional counterparts, they have no assets that incurr costs no matter how
down the market it

Hilton, Marriott, etc all still have MASSIVE amounts of physical property that
they have to maintain year around no matter if they are full or empty. Airbnb
has none of those costs.

This makes them more flexible and are able to quickly respond to changes in
the travel market, more so than their traditional competitors

~~~
admax88q
Marriott doesn't own their hotels, they lease them from third party owners. I
would wager that Hilton is doing the same.

~~~
syshum
I dont know about the Marriott family of brands specifically but I would image
like most large companies in this sector they have a Mix of Franchisees and
Direct owned properties.

Hilton Certainly does under several of its brands.

This Franchise model does not change my statement really at all, as it is far
different model than what airbnb has

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baron_harkonnen
Reality still hasn't hit the travel industry yet. We still haven't even begun
to see the impact of covid on the economy start to unravel.

Business travel is done, but this is where a huge amount of airline and hotel
profits come from. Travel is dirt cheap right now because, at least in the US,
airlines have to fly. They can't lay off employees or reduce staff until,
currently, end of September. But once they can I suspect we'll see very
different behavior for airlines.

Beyond that we still haven't started to feel the full impact of all the job
losses, and the people who remain employed but at substantially lower rates,
or in more volunerable positions.

The relatively young travelers that make up a lot of AirBnb's business, have
largely not been concerned about the virus, certainly aren't concerned about
future economic impacts and have mostly seen cheap flights with hotels
unwilling to book so they head to a rental.

These are travelers whose optimism is based on a decade+ of perpetual economic
growth. Even those losing their jobs don't really believe that there can be a
prolonged period where it's hard to find work.

I believe that this coming Fall will bring a lot of reality to the forefront.
I suspect leadership at AirBNB has similar thoughts and wants to get that IPO
before the buzzer.

~~~
thebean11
I think the big bucks for AirBnb in the future are in the medium-long term
rental market, not the vacation market. The >1 month rentals also happen to
bypass most of the regulations they're having issues with.

~~~
LegitShady
I dont think they have any competitive advantage there.

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DamnYuppie
Am I the only one who is super eager for them to go public so that I can short
them?

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MarkMc
I'm super eager for the opposite reason: I want to go long. In 3 years
people's travel habits will mostly be back to normal, and AirBnb has a very
strong competitive moat

~~~
schnable
What's their moat?

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thebean11
The main one to me is network effect. Hosts will join the platform because
there are renters there, renters will join because there are hosts.

~~~
heavenlyblue
You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating.

This is a train that went away a long time ago. AirBNB is slowing down and
becoming the yellow pages/TripAdvisor of the internet (that is very clear in
terms of the commodification of the review process).

It doesn’t mean they will fail, however you can’t just state they will grow
forever.

~~~
thebean11
> You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating.

Not sure how this has anything to do with the network effect point I brought
up. I definitely never stated they will "grow forever", I said the network
effects of their platform are a sort of moat.

Do you have a source for AirBNB slowing down?

~~~
heavenlyblue
You brought up a very obvious point.

Any marketplace will benefit from network effects. The devil is in the extent
to which you can take advantage of these. And you made no points about that.

~~~
thebean11
Sure, my comment wasn't great. Was just surprised by the chef thing since it
seemed like a non sequitur.

Do you have the source about the slowdown? Really curious.

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thebean11
As someone who was looking into escaping the city for a bit on AirBnb a couple
months ago, I think they might be doing better than many people think.

~~~
imperialdrive
You'd think so but my brother started an extended WFH road trip and his first
booking (after a very long drive) ended up going to hell due to the host not
having the place ready and to top it off Airbnb has some crazy policies such
as: if you have any issue it's a 100% refund (ok, great you think) but since
there is no leeway to even attempt to work something out with a host, the host
will always leave poor feedback, which (get this) you can not view unless you
leave a review. Bonkers. Not worth the trouble for people who have enough
money to not want to worry about the hassle and headache.

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tempsy
Travel might come back but one thing I'm more confident that the pandemic has
changed is awareness and empathy for systemic inequities in our society. Uber
and Lyft are currently dealing with an existential crisis to their business
model in California that I think will reverberate into housing eg greater
empathy across cities on issues related to affordable housing and how Airbnb
has crowded out would be renters and buyers for what are essentially illegal
hotels.

Also with business travel being depressed for quite some time I doubt many
business travelers would be looking to Airbnb to get a deal when hotel prices
will be depressed for the foreseeable future.

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yangmaster
Airbnb might just IPO in time before the first batch of RSUs expire later this
year.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/airbnb-
employe...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/airbnb-employees-
ipo-payouts.html)

[1] [https://www.teamblind.com/post/Early-AirBnB-Employees-IPO-
NB...](https://www.teamblind.com/post/Early-AirBnB-Employees-IPO-NBfHHjaS)

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ProfessorLayton
I'm very curious to see what their public valuation will be, but at the same
time the market seems to be doin its own thing, so perhaps's it'll do great.

But all things considered, it's pretty clear that everything is too volatile
right now, but AirBnB is being pressured to IPO anyway. If the market doesn't
have an appetite for travel, I foresee a lot of recent AirBnB hires taking a
huge haircut on their total comp.

