A new analysis of booking and revenue data for Airbnb has found the short-term rental platform isn’t likely causing rents to increase much at this point, but the company’s rapid growth and incentive for a larger commercial share聽could change that in the future, Wednesday.
Honolulu has 1,400 active listings on , roughly the same as Las Vegas and Boston.
But the percent of those rentals that are considered commercial 鈥 as in, apartments that are rented out most of the year to visitors as opposed to someone just offering聽their couch a few days each year 鈥 is twice as high in Honolulu.
In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s analysis determined that Honolulu had the highest commercial share at 21.1 percent. The average across all markets was 9.7 percent.
The experts interviewed in the story say that’s important because it’s the commercial rentals that one, account for the most revenue, and two, actually result in a rental being taken off the market, which in turn could drive up rental prices.
Airbnb hosts had $1.1 billion in revenue across all markets in the past year, the story says, with the commercial share accounting for 32.7 percent of that.
Honolulu’s commercial share accounted for 45 percent of its overall revenue, making the city second only to Los Angeles, according to the .
Airbnb disputes the analysis.
“This analysis doesn鈥檛 provide a complete and accurate picture of our community,” Airbnb spokesman Alison Schumer said in a statement. “According to this analysis, 90 percent of the Airbnb listings in these 25 cities were booked for less than 180 days. Additionally, this analysis shows that Airbnb listings are a small fraction of the housing market — Airbnb listings shared for more than half the year make up .07% of the housing stock in these cities.”
Honolulu is facing a housing shortage (a found a need for 14,310 units to be built by 2020) and soaring costs聽to buy a home (median聽prices have聽topped $700,000). That’s coupled with coming to the islands at a time when hotels rooms are rarely empty.
Meanwhile, Airbnb has been around the country about a deal that would involve them renting their units out on a short-term basis instead of long-term in exchange for a cut of the profit.
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii joined two other senators last month in the commercial use of the quickly聽expanding short-term rental market.
Airbnb is by far the biggest platform offering such rentals, but not the only. , and provide similar services.
Here’s what Schatz and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Elizabeth Warren had to say in their July 13 letter to the FTC:
鈥淲e are concerned that short-term rentals may be exacerbating housing shortages and driving up the cost of housing in our communities. We have also read troubling reports of racial discrimination on some short-term rental platforms. Furthermore, we are concerned that communities and consumers may be put at risk through violations of sensible health, safety, and zoning regulations under state and local law,鈥 the senators said.
鈥淚n order to assess of the use and impact of the short-term rental market, we need reliable data on the commercial use of online platforms. We believe the FTC is best positioned to address this data gap in an unbiased manner and we urge the Commission to conduct a review of commercial operators on short-term rental platforms.鈥
Read the full FiveThirtyEight story .
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Nathan Eagle is a deputy editor for Civil Beat. You can reach him by email at neagle@civilbeat.org or follow him on Twitter at , Facebook and Instagram .