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Category: All About Airbnb

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Airbnb Rules All About Airbnb

Is Airbnb legal in NYC?

New York City is one of the country’s biggest short-term rental markets, in fact NYC is in the top 10 important markets for Airbnb with more than 50,000 listings. According to Airbnb data provider Airbtics, a studio apartment in Brooklyn generates up to $30,000 USD per year. But if you are looking to start a STR in NYC you have to know that the State of New York counts with tough restriction and regulation laws on short-term rentals and similar. 

Here we will provide some useful information that can help you better understand the New York City Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL) and other regulations that New York City and the State of New York have for short-term rentals.

What are the short-term rental regulations in NYC and the Multiple Dwelling Law?

The New York State Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL) classifies buildings containing three or more dwelling units as “Class A” multiple dwellings (MDL, Article 1, Sections 4-7, 4-8.a.) The law states that “Class A” multiple dwellings must be occupied for at least 30 or more consecutive days by the same individual or group of people independently. In such properties short-term (less than 30 days) leases are illegal, unless a “permanent resident” of the dwelling is present during the entire rental period, which eliminates corporate hosts and also forces the short-term stay of the tenants in a shared space.

Is also illegal any kind of advertising for short-term rentals prohibited by MDL, this includes listing those rentals on Airbnb or other online STR platforms. Fines for infringements of the law can go from: $1,000 to $5,000 to $7,500 for first, second and third (or more) respectively. These fines can be imposed both on individual hosts and on the rental platform on which those illegal rentals are being advertised.

A “Class B” multiple dwelling is a multiple dwelling which is occupied, as a rule transiently, as the more or less temporary stay of a group of people or individuals. This class shall include hotels, lodging houses, rooming/boarding houses, lodgings, club houses and dwellings designed as private houses but occupied by one or two families with five or more transient boarders in one household. These previously mentioned would not generally be subject to the MDL’s regulations.

OCCUPANCY RATES IN NEW YORK CITY?

Learn more about how to find Airbnb occupancy rates in the major cities of the world!

Other requirements and regulations to have in mind if you’re thinking about starting a STR in NYC

  • Certificate of Occupancy or CO: Every residential building in New York City must have a certificate of occupancy. If you already have a certificate of occupancy you can look it up at the New York City Department of Buildings website. In case you don’t, you must get it before starting using your building as STR or LDR and you can find out more about how to issue it here.
  • Business licensing: Maybe you’ll also need to issue a special license or permit for business in New York. You can consult about it on the City’s business portal and on the City’s business regulation finder.
  • Rent control laws: If you live under a rent stabilized or rent controlled property, it is fundamental to first determine if the short-term rental of the housing unit is permitted. You can review the rules at The New York Administrative Code for rent stabilized (Section 26-501-26-520) and rent controlled (Section 26-401-26-415) housing. For further guidance please contact your local rent board.
  • Taxes: New York City and New York State impose multiple taxes that may apply to transient occupancy or tourist use. For more information about hotel sales taxes please consult the New York State Department of Taxation’s website for more information about hotel sales taxes and the City’s website for information about NYC hotel occupancy taxes.
  • Zoning Laws: Consult the New York City Zoning Code for information about areas in which transient rental buildings can be located.
  • Lease Restrictions: Are you living in a residential lease and considering to start a STR there?     Then first you have to make sure to get your landlords permission for rental arbitrage. You can even ask them to put the permission in legal papers to avoid future problems. Tenants who violate their leases by engaging in unauthorized rentals could face eviction.

Airbnb and their history with the data sharing law in NYC: is Airbnb still permitted?

In August 2018 the New York Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the Homesharing Surveillance Ordinance. The ordinance requires Airbnb and similar rental advertising sites to turn over hosts and their listings information to the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, which goes after illegal short-term rentals.

In the same month, Airbnb sued the New York City Council in court to stop the implementation of this law claiming it violates the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Federal Stored Communications Act (“SCA”).

In 2020 Airbnb dismissed its federal lawsuit due to an amendment of the law. The new terms of the settlement and adjusted law now state as follows:

  •  Instead of monthly reporting of the data now it is required quarterly
  • Listings that qualify for the reported data are those who offer the short-term rental of an entire dwelling unit or a short-term rental for three or more individuals at the same time
  • The platform won’t need to report listings that rent the dwelling unit or housing accommodation for an aggregate of four days or less

New York data-sharing requirements for Airbnb hosts and their listing

STR on Airbnb is still allowed in NYC as long as you agree to share certain infromation with the city.

Before Airbnb disclose your data to the City, they’ll ask for your consent to share this information. If you consent, they’ll provide information about your hosting and listing activity to the City.

Here’s the list of the data Airbnb will be sharing with the City of New York

  1. Host & Co-Host(s) information:
    1. Name
    2. Physical address (street name, street number, apartment or unit number, borough or county, and zip code)
    3. Phone number
    4. Email
    5. Profile ID number
    6. Profile URL
    7. Total amount the platform transmitted to the host
    8. the account name and consistently anonymized identifier for the account number for the account used by host to receive payments
  2. Listing(s) information:
    1. Physical address (street name, street number, apartment or unit number, borough or county, and zip code)
    2. Listing’s name
    3. Listing’s ID number
    4. URL of listing
    5. Type (ex: entire place, private room etc.)
    6. Total number of nights booked per listing

For further guidance you can consult Airbnb’s Help Center section about New York or contact Airbnb.

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Vacation Rental Pricing Tools in 2022

Guests needs summed up in four forces to set your base price.
The primary needs of guests are summed up in four forces to set your base price.

This article is written for experienced vacation rental managers who have a background an understanding of the rental market and its pricing.

There are two types of vacation rental pricing tools when it comes to price efficiency for your vacation rentals. 

  1. Dynamic pricing solution 
    1. PriceLabs, BeyondPricing, DPGO 
  3. Build your in-house pricing solution using data 
    1. SeeTransparent, Airbtics, AirDNA, Alltherooms Analytics, Key Data Dashboard 

Dynamic pricing is convenient for vacation rental managers as they set the prices for you. They take care of events, supply-demand, and seasonality into account to price. Some of the providers allow you to apply customized rules too. 

If you are a savvy rental manager or if you have a revenue management team, you need to have more control over the dynamic pricing algorithms. This is when you start using the in-house pricing solution. You start needing to have better control of your pricing while automatically applying seasonality, supply-demand, and events into consideration. 

Here are three data-driven ways to perfect your pricing to maximize the RevPAR.

  1. Track how competitors are pricing and adjust the price accordingly. 
  2. See the breakdown of your market by price and refine your market positioning.
  3. Analyze the guest demands in your area and increase the daily rate by serving under-supplied needs. 
Vacation rental pricing tool

Track how competitors are pricing and adjust the price accordingly with vacation rental pricing tools

AirDNA, SeeTransparent, and Airbtics are vacation rental data providers, but they also offer Airbnb Pricing Tool. All of them commonly have a calendar view of future 365 days rates and occupancy rates. This view allows you to understand the rate changes on specific events or over the seasons. 

 

Make sure you only see the data of your competitors! If you are luxury rentals, it only makes sense to track the rating of other luxury rentals. Airbtics offers a custom calendar view that filters and shows your competitor rates only, grab a 15-minute demo! 

Enhance your vacation rental pricing strategy by understanding your market positioning

 

The objective of market positioning is to establish the image or identity of your vacation rental. By understanding this, you can advertise your vacation rental more efficiently.

Vacation rental positioning map

This is how a market positioning map for a vacation rental could look like. Airbtics provides market analytics per price range, which helps you to build this positioning map. 

Airbtics provides market analytics per price range

You can select your daily rate, and find out what a typical listing looks like with your pricing point. You can also go through different pricing ranges and see which pricing range your listing fit and research how you can move your pricing range.

Analyze the guest demands in your area and increase the daily rate by serving under-supplied needs

Guests to your destination have different needs and those could be summed up into 4 forces –

  1. Location
  2. Capacity
  3. Service
  4. Amenity 
Guests needs summed up in four forces to set your base price.

Using our research tool you can find out how the daily rate, occupancy rate, and RevPAR are being affected by those 4 demands. When there are under-supplied needs, it’ll have abruptly high.

Airbnb research tool

Conclusion

The vacation rental industry has been continuously evolving and adapting to use better data to optimize their rental pricing. By going through the 3 steps I’ve mentioned above, you should have a better understanding of your pricing strategy. Nearly all of our customers had increased their RevPAR through fine-tuning their pricing using the data, and the number varies from 5 – 40%. 

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Aumenta tu RevPAR analizando las demandas de los clientes

Pet friendly Airbnb is booming

¿Cómo aumentar la tarifa diaria de tu catálogo de Airbnb manteniendo la tasa de ocupación? Nuestro equipo ha estado haciendo un loco experimento usando datos de Airbnb durante los últimos dos meses. Queríamos ver si podemos hacer que los anfitriones cobren 20-30% más de su tarifa diaria manteniendo su tasa de ocupación sin invertir una gran suma de dinero.


Somos una compañía de análisis de alquileres a corto plazo procesando dos mil millones de datos de noches en Airbnb cada semana y usando esto fuimos capaces de concluir que puedes aumentar tu tarifa diaria y tener el mismo número de reservaciones, pero atrayendo diferentes grupos de personas y modificando tus ofertas.


Estos son ejemplos comunes de factores que pueden alterar la tarifa diaria:


• Aceptar mascotas
• Jacuzzi o Piscina
• Apto para todo público
• Apto para trabajadores remotos
• Aceptar estadías de largo plazo
• Estacionamiento


Pero la pregunta es: ¿cuánto más puede incrementar mi tarifa diaria al agregar estos servicios?, una mejor pregunta es: ¿hay alguna manera de identificar esto?


¡Buenas noticias! Nuestra herramienta de análisis de demanda te muestra la comparación de la tarifa diaria de tu catálogo con ciertos servicios o comodidades versus sin ellos. Esto puede ser útil si estás pensando en subarrendar o si ya tienes residencias vacacionales, pero quieres aumentar tus ingresos para este verano.


A continuación, le mostraremos unos estudios de campo. Estos gráficos son tomados desde nuestra aplicación.
. 

¿Debería de mantener mi política de cancelación estricta?

1° Caso. San Antonio, Texas. ¿Tu alquiler tiene una estricta política de cancelación y está localizada en San Antonio? Malas noticias, tus alquileres puede tener hasta 40% menos de reservaciones que los alquileres que no tienen una estricta política de privacidad. Si quieres incrementar tu RevPAR, tal vez quieras considerar tu política de cancelación.

How airbnb cancellation policy affect your occupancy rate?

¿Debería aceptar huéspedes de medio plazo en mi Airbnb?

2° Caso. Navarre Beach, Florida. Es tiempo de ocuparnos de las necesidades de los huéspedes de medio plazo. Los huéspedes de Airbnb buscan una cocina, una lavadora o un estacionamiento más que un jacuzzi o una piscina. Tal vez ellos solo prefieran visitar una playa cercana. Tienes altas probabilidades de incrementar tu RevPAR equipando la residencia con lavadora y cocina (y estacionamiento, si puedes).

Mid-term airbnb is on demand

¿Debería permitir mascotas en mi Airbnb?

3° Caso. Sunriver, Oregon. (Este patrón se ha observado en muchos otros destinos en EE. UU.)


A los estadounidenses les encanta viajar con sus mascotas o al menos están dispuestos a pagar una buena suma de dinero por ello, esto según los datos que observamos. Hemos visto un aumento tanto en la tarifa promedio diaria como en las tasas de ocupación de los catálogos que permiten mascotas en Sunriver, Oregon. Para su referencia, Sunriver es uno de los principales destinos de verano en los EE. UU. En 2021, el 60% de las noches en Airbnb ya están reservadas para este verano.


Habrá mucho más desgaste al permitir que las mascotas estén en su residencia vacacional, pero puede cambiar de opinión después de saber cuánto más puede ganar al permitir mascotas en su hogar.

Pet friendly Airbnb is booming

¿Debería comprar una lavadora para mi Airbnb?

4° Caso. Brighton, Reino Unido.
¿Qué está pasando en el Reino Unido? Existe una gran demanda de estadías a medio plazo en este tradicional destino vacacional llamado Brighton. Esto refleja la restricción actual en cuanto a viajes en el Reino Unido. Las personas no pueden viajar a menos que sea necesario. Los catálogos con jacuzzis o piscinas no se reservarán, pero los catálogos con cocina y lavadora están bajo demanda.

Airbnb with Pool and occupancy rate

Aclaración: Los datos solo muestran la tarifa diaria y la diferencia en la tasa de ocupación entre los catálogos con un servicio específico y sin él. Por lo tanto, podría darse el caso de que los catálogos con piscinas tengan tarifas diarias más bajas, pero no se debe a la piscina, sino a que los catálogos con piscinas tienden a estar lejos de la playa.


Sin embargo, esto puede ayudarlo a comprender la demanda en su mercado. Muchos de nuestros usuarios están utilizando esta herramienta para encontrar la brecha entre la oferta y la demanda en el mercado. Luego, comercializan estratégicamente sus catálogos para dirigirse al grupo de huéspedes con más escasez en cuanto a sus demandas. Por lo general, esto da como resultado un aumento en la cantidad de reservas y un aumento en el RevPAR.


*OBS: Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR sigla en inglés) o Ingresos por habitación disponible.

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Airbnb hosting: Why you should be checking out your competition

Whether you’re an Airbnb host as a full-time business or renting out your spare room for some extra cash, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to be able to do it well. Creating your listings, taking photos of your property, ensuring the calendar is accurate, confirming bookings, etc. And that’s just the beginning. There are various tasks you need to complete before and after every booking to ensure a pleasant experience for your guests.

Yet after all the hard work already put in, your bookings don’t seem to be going up and the calendar remains empty. Especially in the middle of a pandemic when travel is limited, every booking you make is valuable. It makes you wonder if it’s even worth it.

While each host’s situation is different, checking out what the competition is up to should give you an idea of what steps you can take to improve your situation.

Here are four reasons why you should check out your competitors today.

1. Gives you a benchmark

How is your pricing compared to other vacation rentals in your area? Too high? Too low?

If you’re just starting out with Airbnb hosting, checking out what other Airbnb hosts in your area are already doing would give you a good idea of how you should price your property and what to provide. It would also give you a chance to see how much revenue you can potentially make. Doing a search on the Airbnb site for available properties in the area and checking out each listing or using Airbnb’s own pricing suggestion tool are a few ways to do it. 

But if you’re short on time or want to see more in-depth information in a given area at once then using a vacation rental analytics platform would be the best option. This type of platform can provide you with a breakdown of various metrics such as the occupancy rate and average daily rate of your area over a period of time. You can easily slice and dice the data available to get a better understanding of your market.

2. Helps you understand your target audience better

You might feel that your offerings are already at a competitive level, but might still be struggling to draw in those extra guests. 

Regularly checking out your competition ensures you have your finger on the pulse. Reading your competitors’ review section will allow you to find out qualitative information on what customers enjoy or don’t enjoy in certain accommodations, what their needs are, and what gaps are there that you can fill in with your own offerings.

3. Improves your marketing

How did others promote their listings? Did they mainly rely on just the Airbnb listing or have they posted on other sites too? Do they also have a dedicated website or social media accounts for their vacation rentals?

How can people book your place if they don’t know about it? Once you’ve got a good grasp of the people you can target, you would be able to ramp up your efforts to make sure your marketing is personalised to your prospective customers. With COVID-19 changing the way we travel, it’s important to showcase that you’ve taken such considerations, such as an increased emphasis on cleanliness or staycations becoming more commonplace. Here are some of our suggestions on increasing your Airbnb bookings during the pandemic.

4. Determines whether it’s worth the investment

As mentioned earlier, great Airbnb hosting, while can be fun and extremely rewarding, is no walk in the park. If you’re just starting out, seeing what’s already out there and understanding how they’re performing means that you can determine whether it’s worth putting in the time and resources for you.

Airbtics analytics platform’s upcoming update will make price benchmarking and finding out your potential revenue a lot easier. The new Benchmark dashboard means you’d be able to see the top ten listings of your area by revenue, along with property type, ADR and reviews at a glance. If you’d like to get a firsthand look, make sure to join the community and receive news about our latest feature updates and releases.

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Should Airbnb hosts engage in Airbnb Experiences?

While accommodation is one of the first things people look for when planning for their travel, many people travel primarily for local experiences. Airbnb recognizes this and as you might be aware, they introduced ‘Airbnb Experiences’ in 2016 which allows users to host activities, tours and classes, and users can book directly on the platform.

Table of Contents

What are the pros and cons?

Nowadays, people seek for authenticity. Airbnb Experiences started off by reaching out to the locals on things to do in their cities. It adds a personal touch, rather than the usual “top things to do” recommended by tour guides, where many would be deemed as tourist traps. That sets Airbnb Experiences apart from other booking platforms. Furthermore, it is always helpful for travelers to be able to book both their accommodations and activities for their trips through the same platform. As for the hosts, they can be getting paid for doing something that they love, be it introducing their hobby or simply the engagement with people. It may also help to bring more guests to their rental properties listed on Airbnb through those experiences. 

However, the downside of Airbnb Experiences is that they may not be available in all regions. It is dependent on the interest of the locals and in some places, it may be hard to get them to be involved. Having said that, the authenticity and unique experiences of those activities may be what attracts people, so it can be a double-edge sword. Since the experiences offered are based on personal interests and passion of the hosts, it may be hard to keep track of their quality of service in delivering the services. On the other hand, for the local hosts, they may worry about the volume of people visiting their city. If it is not a popular city, there may not be people interested in engaging in the experiences they offer. There could also be language barriers between the hosts and guests.  

How has the response been?

68% of the travelers regard food and drinks as the most important component of travel, as mentioned in an article by Eater. Hence, Airbnb Experiences have included more than 3000 experiences in cooking-related activities. Other popular experiences are horse yoga, mindful movement (meditating and hiking), Nama’ Tastings (wine and yoga), Carb Feast (pizza and pasta), tie dye classes and historical walking tours. Airbnb came up with a list of the trending cities to visit in 2019 and the top 3 cities are Kaikoura in New Zealand, Xiamen in China and Puebla in Mexico. 

Airbnb Experiences also opened up business opportunities for countries where STRs are not allowed. For example, in Singapore, the government banned short term stays and the minimum period of stay is 6 months. With the launch of Airbnb Experiences, local hosts can make revenue through this channel.

How has COVID-19 affected Airbnb Experiences?

With Covid-19, Airbnb Experiences adapted with the situation. They shifted their target to the domestic market and added more online activities. As of May 2020, there were 300 online experiences on the platform. Some of the popular online experiences include “Sangria and Secrets with Drag Queens” in Lisbon, Portugal with $150k of revenue in their first month and “Tarot Reading with Mak Jagger” in Austin, Texas with $11k of revenue in one month. 

However, there are still hosts who are unable to transition to the channels online. It may be due to many reasons like not having a stable internet connection in their region, the hosts not being tech-savvy or the experience is simply too difficult to be carried out online. Such hosts are solely dependent on the domestic market for as long as the Covid-19 situation persists.



Conclusion

Airbnb Experiences has grown 13 times faster than their rental property business, making a revenue of more than $1 billion in the second quarter of 2019. If you’re looking for a creative way to increase your revenue, it’s worth considering hosting Airbnb Experiences. You may just find something that the market is willing to spend money on, be it online or physically. The first step is always a gamble as to the feasibility of the ideas but with some time, things get easier and better! 

But before you start advertising your Experience package, you might want to consider whether you  have enough visitors visiting your city to engage in the experiences you are offering. Airbtics provides close to real-time data on the number of visitors visiting any specified cities, as well as booking rate, occupancy rate, pricing strategies and other customizable data that may be useful boosting your revenue. With Airbtics data, you can have a better grasp of the market and decide what types of experience you can offer. If you are not able to shift your experiences online, it is even more important to know your market and competitors well, which will help you better plan your next move in boosting your revenue. 



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The Top 5 Airbnb Trends to Watch Out for in 2021

As the year comes to an end, it’s safe to say that Airbnb trends and insights have gone through a rollercoaster of fluctuations within the past year. With tests for COVID-19 more widely available, destinations finding ways to safely reopen without the need for 2-week quarantines, and a vaccine already in sight, constant change is the new “normal”. With a more positive outlook on the pandemic front,  the predictions for Airbnb travel trends and insights for 2021 are highly anticipated by those waiting for the markets to bounce back. Data analytics and accurate information play a vital role in understanding these predictions for the next year as Airbnb hosts, property managers, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), and vacation rental professionals alike are buckling up their strategies and tactics for business in 2021.

Here are the top 5 Airbnb travel trends and insights for 2021 based on the current climate in the short-term rental industry:

Table of Contents

1. Year-over-Year (YoY) growth in Airbnb bookings will bounce back eventually

North America

YoY growth North America Airbnb trends

Throughout the year, the U.S. experienced diverse responses to the pandemic as some states enforced more strict stay-at-home orders while other states still have yet to enforce strict lockdown procedures. This varied response to the pandemic is reflected in the data trends of YoY growth in different regions of the U.S. and sets the foundation of which Airbnb trends will continue into 2021. 

One factor that may change the predictions is the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine. On Friday, December 11, 2020, Pfizer and BioNTech announced the historic first authorization of a COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. in an effort to deliver hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to Americans by the end of 2021. The vaccine will be given to healthcare workers and high-risk elders in care facilities first, but how soon the vaccine will be available to other civilians is still up in the air. If the vaccine is successful at keeping American travelers safe from COVID-19, 2021 may be able to see more drastic YoY growth in the average number of bookings for properties. 

Currently, the U.S. is still experiencing the devastating effects of the pandemic as some states are once again shutting down, such as New York’s ban on indoor dining, and a patchwork of fresh restrictions on social distancing in other states. YoY growth increased in only a select few major U.S. destinations.

As shown in the graph, the YoY growth of bookings in Big Bear, California grew even more in the 4th quarter of 2020 than compared to Q1. We can infer from this trend that Big Bear will continue to thrive as a four season resort destination in 2021. On the other hand, several other American cities have yet to reach pre-COVID levels.

This individualistic course of action from each state spares no room for a unified, solid trend that defines the predictions for vacation rentals in the U.S. However, Airbnb hosts and other short-term rental industry professionals can take a closer look at the data for each state and how each has performed during each quarter of 2020 to predict the near future in 2021. 

Europe

2-YoY-Growth-Europe-2020

In Europe, the Airbnb trends accumulated from 2020 indicate that despite several hopeful factors, Europe has yet to see drastic improvements in their YoY growth for Airbnb. The Airbnb trends for 2021 in Europe point towards a slower climb towards normalcy as each European country continues to battle their own COVID-19 cases within their borders. 

This December of 2020, a new and more infectious strain of COVID-19 shut down Europe, causing a new wave of travel bans and restrictions, creating a logistics crisis in the U.K., and hitting European stocks quite severely. About 18 million people in Southeast England went back into lockdown, an event that would certainly cause Great Britain’s YoY growth in booking to decrease once again going into 2021. We can see from the trends this year how tremendously cities in Great Britain have had to pull back from their Airbnb bookings, and we can expect the same from this new wave of COVID-19 infections.

In other European cities, we can see a similar declining trend in Airbnb booking growth as the year comes to an end. Europe will continue to balance this new and infectious COVID-19 strand with the introduction of the new vaccine going into 2021, so it’s vital that Airbnb hosts and vacation rental professionals to keep track of the YoY growth trends during this time.

Going forward, the Airbnb trends and insights will reflect all of the different factors that have impacted the YoY growth in Airbnb bookings in different fluctuations. Short-term rental professionals can use this information to understand where their current strategy stands each quarter and use each data point as a benchmark to improve or address different pain points.

Asia

YoY Growth 2020 Asia Airbnb Trends

Major cities in Asia were the first to experience the deadly effects of the virus, control the virus, and also to experience second waves of infections. Going into 2021, the Airbnb trends and insights for Asia indicate that although many cities in Asia have controlled their infections, it will still take a significant amount of time for booking levels to bounce back to ‘normal’.

Several different Asian destinations such as Thailand, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and South Korea have implemented mandatory 2-week quarantines for any foreigners coming into their borders in order to avoid new infections from outside visitors. This restrictive measure on travelers has had a significant impact on the YoY growth of bookings on Airbnb because travelers are deterred from traveling to these Asian cities with the requirement to pay out-of-pocket expenses to quarantine.

Going into 2021, there is no definite date when the 2-week quarantines will no longer be mandatory. Instead of only relying on current events and news, vacation rental professionals should also rely on accurate data reported from each major city to understand how profitable vacation rentals could potentially be in 2021 because data serves as an accurate precedent for upcoming trends.

Although different cities of the world are experiencing different phases of the coronavirus, the majority of experts predict “a rebound in international tourism in 2021, in particular by the third quarter of 2021, while around 20% expects it to occur only in 2022”, according to the World Tourism Organization.

This prediction points towards a more hopeful future of bringing YoY growth of Airbnb bookings back to normalcy. As hosts, property managers, tourism boards, and financial institutions wait for this prediction to become reality, they can focus their efforts on preparing for this trend with Airbnb insights that help solidify their business model for 2021.

*Note* The YoY growth shown in the graphs is not the platform-wise YoY growth in Airbnb bookings, but instead the YoY growth of the average number of bookings for properties that are available in both 2019 and 2020. If you are interested in the YoY growth in bookings platform-wise (or gross booking value) visit here. 

2. Beaches are still trending destinations for Airbnbs in 2021

As the whole world continues to navigate the new ‘normal’ for travel, some destinations in the world have suffered more than others from travel restrictions and lockdowns. Despite the uncertainty of the travel industry, people all over the world are still hopeful of a future that allows safe travel. Many travel itineraries and trips for 2020 have been canceled, but more importantly, they have been postponed until 2021. Now that 2021 is already on the horizon, which destinations are trending? 

The easiest way to find this out is to do an analysis of internet searches all over the world. Using several different tools, Airbnb hosts and other professionals in the travel industry can find out where travelers will flock to once more restrictions are lifted by looking at the numbers. Understanding the numbers, demographics, and overall measurements in the travel industry for the upcoming year is a vital tactic to start strategizing for short-term rental business. 

Consumers and travelers are already looking forward to the summer of 2021, the summer that could redeem the time people spent cooped up in their homes with cabin fever. With hopes high and the case of the travel bug going around, it’s no surprise that the majority of trending searches for travel destinations relate to most beaches and exotic island destinations.

Our data analysis on Airbnb reviews suggests that the appearance of the word “beach” increased by 2.7x during the pandemic, and will continue to spike in popularity. According to internet searches, there is a surge in searches for these specific destinations:

  • The Maldives
  • French Polynesia
  • Los Cabos, Mexico
  • Miami- The booming business of short-term rentals in South Florida 
  • Maui and Oahu
  • Punta Cana
  • Orlando
  • Las Vegas
  • Riviera Maya, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum
  • Cancun

All of these destinations point towards the public’s movement toward more secluded areas and locations that are relaxing, vacation-style getaways. This trend indicated a huge shift from business travel within heavily populated metropolitan areas to more remote and private areas.

3. Properties optimized for domestic tourism are on the rise

We’re not sure how long it will take for international travel and tourism to bounce back completely, but one thing is certain: domestic tourism and travel are some of the biggest Airbnb trends for 2021. 

Travelers looking for new, innovative ways to satisfy their desire to explore new destinations have fueled the booming popularity of domestic tourism. This upcoming Airbnb trend has already manifested in the last few quarters of 2020 as travel bans and restrictions lifted in some cities while others shut back down.

In other words, visiting local attractions and destinations within their own borders is a huge trend for the short-term rental industry that will stay relevant going into 2021 as people continue to search for staycation getaways to escape both cabin fever and the current international travel bans. 

One interesting result of the booming domestic tourism trend in the short-term rental industry is that properties in domestic locations near cabins, beaches, or mountains surprisingly experienced huge growth in 2020. These domestic destinations hit their best numbers while most short-term rentals in urban areas continued to decline. This shift in the movement of travelers flocking to more secluded areas is a significant key indicator of where STR professionals should invest in next in 2021.

In particular, this vacation rental trend is significant to hosts and short-term rental professionals because this key insight can help them re-strategize and pivot their business strategies based on different properties, locations, and amenities that will attract domestic travelers. Vacation rental professionals can use this data to visualize their objectives and goals for the new year and understand the new type of demographic they need to tailor their niche to (domestic travelers). 

As hopes are high and the desire to travel continues to fester, it’s important that vacation rental professionals understand the sentiment of the data trends and re-prioritize their resources where needed.

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4. More Airbnb properties are becoming long-term stays

Remote work is now more important than ever. This whole year, companies all over the world pivoted towards a more remote-friendly environment, getting rid of unnecessary physical presences, office buildings, and more. ‘Work from home’ is a defining trend in 2020 that will continue to shape the world’s future of telework into 2021.

As we approach the new year, workers now place emphasis on the importance of being able to work remotely. The surge of remote jobs will continue into the new year as workers re-prioritize which tasks can be completed through video conferencing or emails rather than in person. The WFH trend is highly relevant for Airbnb or vacation rental professionals because now, Airbnb listings are more likely to be booked for long-term stays.

The reasoning behind this trend is that travelers are no longer restricted by time or location to their jobs. Now, they can extend their stay in a destination while working remotely. Another huge factor behind this trend is that people now have the flexibility from remote work to try living in different areas or neighborhoods that might have a lower cost of living or a better quality of life.

Rental property hosts and short-term rental professionals can leverage this trend for their properties on Airbnb or VRBO in 2021 by strategizing their pricing model for their properties to accommodate long-term or mid-term stays. Instead of taking on several guests that only stay one or two nights, it would be more profitable and mutually beneficial for the STR property owners to rent out their places for a longer period of time (15+ days). One way that vacation rental professionals can promote this is to offer discounts for longer stays (2 weeks or longer). 

In this competitive market, hosts can gain a significant advantage by ensuring their listings are more appealing. One effective strategy is to add subtitles to videos showcasing their properties to make their content accessible to a broader audience. Additionally, subtitles can provide valuable information about the property, local amenities, and nearby attractions.

According to Airbnb’s survey, there was a 128 percent increase in reviews mentioning words like “relocation,” “remote work,” and “trying a new neighborhood,” when it compared July to September of this year to the same time last year. These widely-searched phrases reflect the buzzwords that Airbnb hosts and STR professionals should continue to monitor within the next year. They can leverage these trending Airbnb buzzwords to tailor their rental property services to a specific demographic. 

As the future of both travel and work continues to evolve, consumer behavior will also continue to change. Professionals in the short-term rental industry should monitor these trends to keep track of consumer confidence in vacation rental services or properties. Reviews that mention “trying a new neighborhood” or “relocation” are indicative of the next, biggest trend about consumer behavior: movement from metropolitan areas to satellite cities. 

tendencias de airbnb 2022

5. Airbnb guests are moving from metropolitan areas to satellite cities

As a result of the remote work trend, there is significant movement from heavily populated metropolitan areas to smaller, satellite cities around the area. Workers are realizing that they now have the freedom to relocate to wherever they want because now they are not bound to a specific location because of their work.

This trend was especially apparent as the U.S. experienced mass, unprecedented levels of people moving out of the Bay area or New York to more affordable cities with cheaper costs of living as remote work gave them the flexibility to do so. 

Our data analysis of reviews illustrates this mass movement from urban areas to more secluded areas: the top trending buzzwords found in property reviews include “getaway”, “coastal”, “hut”, “garden”, “farm”, and “cabin”. The combined connotation of this list of buzzwords points toward guests’ sentiment to find more secluded getaway destinations away from their usual, highly-populated urban areas.

Hosts, property managers, and other vacation rental professionals can follow this flocking movement of travelers to new areas outside of large, metropolitan areas and focus their strategy on these satellite cities or outskirt areas. 

Tourists and travelers looking to move to a new neighborhood now have the flexibility to live in areas that are better tailored to their own lifestyles without having to completely commit to the location with a mortgage. Alternatively, Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms make it possible for those looking to relocate to experience living in a specific area outside of their usual home base in metropolitan areas.

In coordination with the Airbnb trend of long-term stays, this trend of moving to satellite locations allows vacation rental professionals to leverage the newfound flexibility of relocation and tailor their rental properties to accommodate this trend. As more people move towards smaller satellite cities, guests and visitors are looking for unique experiences and rental properties that can accommodate their stays. 

The future of travel may be uncertain, but STR professionals can leverage the power of data and Airbnb trends to re-prioritize and strategize for the new year. Some other key considerations to keep in mind include: consumer and business confidence, economic impact, and government support. The world is still experiencing a global recession that greatly influences consumers’ spending decisions, their travel behaviors, and the different measures governments all over the world will take to support tourism.

Professionals in the short-term rental industry must stay prepared for several different factors in 2021, such as shorter booking lead time due to the uncertainty of the pandemic or the continued, drastic shift from hotels to short-term rentals. The best practice of strategizing for the new year is to practice resilience with the help of accurate Airbnb data and insights. 

Categories
All About Airbnb Hosting Tips

Top Tips to Increase AirBnB Bookings During the Pandemic

mask
covid people wearing mask image

Any type of business that revolves around travel and staying away from home experiences difficulties during the Covid 19 pandemic. If you own one or more AirBnB rentals, you need to find a way to increase bookings in order to stay profitable. We have interviewed 3 experienced AirBnB hosts to ask how they are dealing with this. The following tips are safe and effective ways to get more attention on your properties and improve rental revenue overall. 

Offer Self-Isolation With a Greater Benefits

Encouraging travel during times of recommended self-isolation is a challenging marketing method. However, when you have an attractive property in an interesting location, it may help get the type of attention you need. People dislike staying at home for long periods of time, so if you can offer them social distancing in a new place, they may just jump at the chance to see a different set of walls around them.

Focus on Deep Cleaning to Improve Comfort and Trust

While getting away from home seems a delightful proposition during this difficult time period, people are naturally reticent to trust other locations when it comes to their health. A large part of your marketing efforts should include assuring people that you use professional cleaners and proper sanitization methods to ensure that your property will not get them sick. Also, it is 100% necessary that you do so as unintentionally spreading Covid 19 to your renters would be disastrous both for their well-being and your business.

Increase Interest With Low Costs and Easy Cancellation

Although you must remain profitable even during the pandemic, drastically cutting rental prices works well to fill in your bookings calendar. Not only do you need to compete with other AirBnB units, but you also have to persuade people to leave their homes and visit someplace else.

Lack of surety about future travel bands or quarantine regulations may work against your rental business, too. Another tip involves making a simpler cancellation policy with absolutely 100% guarantees and transparency. This helps with marketing, but you should push for delayed bookings at a later date instead of canceling them completely.

Smart Marketing Techniques for Repeat Bookings

Think outside the box during this unique time. To market your AirBnB houses, apartments, and rooms to people who are specifically traveling to help out with the pandemic. Many medical professionals, for example, are volunteering their time in different cities and need places to stay. Go on Facebook, other social media platforms, and the usual booking websites and speak directly to these heroes who would be happy to spend their time in a comfortable home rather than an impersonal hotel room.

When it comes to increasing AirBnB bookings, all of the marketing methods in the world will not help you unless you instill the type of trust that people need to feel these days. Focus on low costs, easy cancellation, deep cleaning, and reaching out to new and former renters who just want to get away from it all for a while. You can maintain your profits and set your business up for increased success after these challenging times are gone.

You can find the full details of the Podcast interviews with hosts here! 

Story from Teri – Charlotte, NC

Story from DeShan – Dallas, TX

Story from Renee – Grrenvile, SC

Story from Christian – Dallas, TX 

Image credit: Designed by Freepik



Categories
Airbnb Investment All About Airbnb

How to invest in Airbnb property – Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

This post was written by Wei Hong Low. 

Airbnb has grown 21% compared to August 2019 earning gross revenue $4,308,726,681. More impressively, it has grown to 150 million users and a current 6,370,563 property listings across 191 countries. So far, it has been very successful for Airbnb.

In Southeast Asia, Malaysia continues to be the fastest-growing country for Airbnb for the second year running. There is a total of 53,000 listings in Malaysia which brings in an estimated RM3 billion direct economic impact in 2018 alone. Knowing that Airbnb business is growing fast in Malaysia, there is a question keeps looming over my head.

What is the best area to start an Airbnb business in Kuala Lumpur — the capital of Malaysia?

Before thinking about the above question, there is another question that immediately pops up in my mind. What am I thinking about? I do not own a house yet, why am I thinking about this question? However, I still decided to google whether there are other ways and here is what I found.

There are two ways from which you could start an Airbnb business. One is to rent out one of your own properties, the other way is to rent other people’s property to launch an Airbnb business. In other words, I do not need to own a property to start!

If you want me to choose which way to start, I would go for the second option first. As it is more flexible, I could rent a property for a relatively short period of time compared to buying a property. The other reason is that I can have a taste of how is it like being a host in Airbnb, before buying a property just for the sake to start an Airbnb business.

In this article, I will be discussing how I manage to obtain the data for later analysis. Without further ado, let’s start!

Data Collection Journey

Before I start to crawl the Airbnb website, I came across this website which seems to change my mind to do other topics. In summary, the Airbnb website actually does not keen to share the data they have. Amsterdam government tried to scrape the website weekly appeared to have been given up in scraping this website.

Despite knowing that I will be facing a lot of issues, I still decided to try to crawl the website. Now, I am going to share some of the problems I faced when I was crawling the websites.

The first problem I faced is the dynamically changed Xpath or CSS path. Meaning that you can’t just use one example of the Xpath, and assuming that using this Xpath on all the listing’s webpages would give you the same piece of information you want.

Besides, the stability of the crawler is also another issue. Here are some of the ways I would suggest if you are scraping Airbnb. The most efficient way I found is to combine both rotating IPs and slowing down the crawler.

After spending hours inspecting through the network tab, I found a path in which you would be able to access the JSON that contains neater data. Therefore, my first problem has been solved! In order to increase the stability of my crawler, I rotated IPs and slowed down my crawler. Finally, I was able to crawl data in a much stable pace.

 

 

Data Cleaning Journey

After collecting the data, let’s do some data cleaning.

First, I obtained the highest price of listings which have at least one review. Let’s called this price — Price A. Moreover, I removed all the listings which are higher than Price A — outlier listings. In other words, outlier listings are listings that have a ridiculously high price but no one has ever left a comment.

Duplicated listings were removed based on localized neighborhood, which only left around 5590 listings. Moreover, the estimated prices of properties for the top 10 listings area were collected from edgeprop, brickz and propsocial.

Data Exploration

A good way to show the price distribution of Kuala Lumpur is to plot a choropleth. This map is segmented by the 11 federal constituencies of Kuala Lumpur. According to the figure, you can see that the northeast part of Malaysia has the highest average price while the central part of Kuala Lumpur has a fairly competitive price.

If you are budget traveller coming to Kuala Lumpur for a vacation, I guess you know which area to stay now!

 

Now, let’s have a bird’s-eye view of the listings distribution across Kuala Lumpur. As you can see, most of the Airbnb listings are accumulated in the city center area of Kuala Lumpur. That’s why the price of the listings are lower in the city area as supply is much higher.

Feel free to navigate the interactive graph to have a much deeper look into a specific area in Kuala Lumpur.

Data Analysis

 

The figure above shows the top 20 most expensive neighborhoods. The triangle represents the number of listings while the bar represents the mean price of listings.

What insight you could get from this graph?

Taman Bukit Maluri, Taman Golden, and Segambut have a relatively higher price and lower listings. One of the reasons might be that there is not enough supply for that area and thus the price is higher. If you are considering to start an Airbnb business, you can do some research on that area whether the place has demand and the cost of renting or owning a house is affordable.

Now, it is time to know the answer.

What is the best area to invest in Kuala Lumpur?

Let’s consider only the top 10 neighborhoods that have the most listings. Before I start to explain the calculation, let me explain some of the terms which I am going to use.

How to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) in the housing market?

ROI (%) = (monthly rental * 12) / property value

Therefore, in our Airbnb case, I use occupancy rate * fee per night * 30 to calculate the monthly rental. Besides, base on the report by AirDNA, the average occupancy rate for Kuala Lumpur is 66% from 2018–2019. Assume there are on average 30 days each month.

Thus, the final formula looks something like this.

ROI (%) = (fee per night * 0.66 * 30 * 12)/ property value

The other variable I am looking for is the demand. However, if I need to get the actual number of bookings, I would need to build a larger scale of a web crawler. Therefore, for my case, I use number of reviews as a proxy to the demand.

relation between demand and ROI among the top 10 KL neighborhood

The best areas to invest are Kampung Baru and Chow Kit, which lie in the top right quadrant. In order words, these neighborhoods have a high ROI (%) and demand. This graph is for an investor who wants to invest in real estate to start an Airbnb business.

On the other hand, for a person who can’t afford to buy a house, but who intends to start an Airbnb business, he or she will need to look into a slightly different metric. Instead of looking into ROI (%), he or she should be looking at airbnb expected monthly income/ monthly rental feewhich is equivalent to (fee per night * 0.66 * 30)/monthly rental fee. Here, I will define it as revenue to cost ratio.

relationship between demand and revenue to cost ratio among

If you do not want to own a house to start an Airbnb business, Chow Kit and Kampung Baru would be the place that you could consider.

All the estimated rental fee and housing price I collected is from some free websites. Therefore, if you want a more accurate number, you would need to subscribe to one of the paid services, for instance, brickz. Besides, all the data above ignore the seasonality effect, as I only scraped data from 29–11–2019 to 02–12–2019.

Final Thoughts

Thank you so much for reading it until the end. I really appreciate it!

What I would say is this mini-project really consumes quite some time for me, so if you do like or prefer this kind of content, do let me know in the comment below.

Besides, the collection of Airbnb data is very time-consuming as well. However, in order to thank you for your support this year, I would like to give it out for free!

The dataset I had collected contains a total of 71 neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. If you are interested to get the dataset so that you are able to play around with it, feel free to check out this link!

This post is featured in Tech In Asia, feel free to check out over here!

See you in the next post!

References

  1. https://www.alltherooms.com/analytics/airbnb-ipo-going-public-revenues-business-model-statistics/
  2. https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2019/07/02/airbnb-generates-rm3bil-in-direct-economic-impact-in-malaysia-last-year

About the Author

Low Wei Hong is a Data Scientist at Shopee. His experiences involved more on crawling websites, creating data pipeline and also implementing machine learning models on solving business problems.

He provides crawling services that can provide you with the accurate and cleaned data which you need. You can visit this website to view his portfolio and also to contact him for crawling services.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Medium.

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