Airbnb's Growth Is Being Driven by Commercial Operators, Report Says
Skift Take
As with any report that covers Airbnb, whether it's from Airbnb itself or from its eternal nemesis, the AH&LA, we have to take this data with a generous helping of multiple grains of salt.
Airbnb's exponential growth in the U.S. is being driven by an increase in hosts renting out multiple units and hosts offering entire homes, according to a report by CBRE Hotels' Americas Research.
The report, issued Thursday on behalf of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, states these trends are especially evident in Airbnb's top 13 domestic markets (Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Oahu, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.)
Airbnb is now valued at an estimated $31 billion after its latest fundraising round.
According to the research, hosts in the U.S. with two or more unit listings generated more than $1.8 billion in Airbnb revenue in 2016, which accounts for some 32.1 percent of Airbnb's total U.S. revenue from October 2015 to 2016.
Revenue from this type of host grew at a faster rate than any other type of Airbnb host,. The report pegs the revenue increase at 89 percent year over year in the top 13 markets.
The majority of Airbnb hosts in the U.S. are also renting out entire homes, rather than sharing their homes with guests. The study said 63.9 percent of hosts in the U.S. are renting out an entire home unit, and they are responsible for generating 81.1 percent (about $4.62 billion) of Airbnb's total U.S. revenue for 2016 ($5.69 billion).
The report was commissioned by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA), a hotel industry association which has long battled Airbnb. The data CBRE used to compile the report came from Airdna, a company that used Web-scraping software to collect data on Airbnb from October 2014 to September 2016.
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