@Fred13
Thank you for the comment.
You say that over the years, Airbnb has been analysed to death - but one can only properly analyse anything when one is in possession of all the true facts and figures. As a result of Airbnb's refusal to release even the most basic data relating to their operations since their very inception, it has been next to impossible for even the experts to conduct proper analysis on the company, so everything up to this point has been nothing more than guesswork and wild speculation.
The release of the S-1 will be the first and only time in Airbnb’s history that anyone will ever have had the opportunity to scrutinise and analyse the company's claims, financials and processes properly, based on real information that has never been publicly available before. That's if their filings contain full material disclosure and no omissions or misrepresentations, of course. Anything less would be in violation of the Securities Laws - an extremely serious offence which would have the potential to derail the IPO altogether, a la the We Work disaster.
I can assure you, Airbnb shifting housing inventory towards STRs hasn't only infuriated local governments. It has incensed and infuriated life-long local residents, who have been priced out of their own cities and displaced from their own hometowns - the cities where they and their families have grown up, lived and worked all their lives, but are now forced to leave because due to the vast swathes of available housing stock being plundered and pillaged by out-of-town and foreign investors - most of which nowadays are large corporations and/or vulture funds/REITs.
While Airbnb couldn't seem to get their customer support act together (be it by accident or design) for the past 7 months - and individual hosts have struggled to get a response to even the most urgent issues, such as missing payouts, house thrashings etc - the company still somehow managed to keep a small army of agents on board throughout, whose sole job it has been to spend all their time phoning professional property managers every day, going all out to persuade them to relist their extensive property portfolios that they'd removed from the platform during the pandemic. Kind of makes a mockery of the back to our roots narrative that they're so fervently pushing pre-IPO.
As does Airbnb's Real Estate plans. Despite having publicly claimed a short time ago that they were shelving those plans to concentrate their focus on their 'core community', behind the scenes, they're still ploughing ahead with their efforts on that front.
The company, as we speak, is currently recruiting for a Real Estate execs, part of whose remit it will be to "compel developers, operators and owners of Multifamily Housing to incorporate Resident Hosting into their investment strategy" (think the disastrous "Niido powered by Airbnb pilot" project, where hosts were 'permitted' to rent out their apartments in designated developments in return for handing over up to 30% of their earnings to the 'management company' on top of their usual hosting fees to Airbnb, and which turned residential housing blocks into giant, frat-house-type Airbnbs" and made pre-existing residents' lives pure hell.
The Real Estate team is also tasked with "leading our efforts to increase the adoption of hosting among the largest landlords in the world and further the Airbnb mission" The 'largest landlords in the world', as everyone is probably aware, are the likes of your Blackstones and your Brookfield Partners (which Airbnb already collaborated with on the Niido projects) - the very same REITs and vulture/cuckoo funds that are currently hoovering up all the 'distressed assets' (ie homes) that millions of regular individuals and families around the world are losing due to the catastrophic effect the pandemic has had on their finances (including innumerable Airbnb hosts who have lost their homes and businesses - in many instances, due in no small part to Airbnb’s now 7-month old Covid-19 Extenuating Circumstances policy)
And then we have Samara, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia's 5-year-old pet project - an entire experimental product department within the company, comprising 'an eclectic team which includes industrial designers, interaction designers, architects, roboticists, mechanical and hardware engineers, material specialists and policy experts', solely dedicated to 'reimagining how houses are built, using a more humanistic, future-oriented, and waste-conscious design'. Samara is also currently recruiting a 'world class Leader to help drive global scale)
Interesting to note that both the Real Estate and Samara arms of the company apparently continued relatively unscathed throughout the pandemic, while the Customer Support, Payments and Trust and Safety teams and departments imploded. Speaks volumes of Airbnb's priorities.
There's a reason why the numbers of listings offered by small, individual hosts is plummeting (and was plummeting, long before COVID) in the majority of markets, while the numbers of listings from professional operators continue to skyrocket. Wall St Journal reported several months ago that a third of all listings are now from 'hosts' operating between 2 and 24 listings, while a further third are listing 25 or more properties on the platform (and you can be sure those numbers have increased exponentially as the pandemic has rumbled on)
And there's a reason why private room listings in cities such as Nashville, for example - which over the past several years (while small local hosts were having their permits rescinded) became totally swamped with "Niido powered by Airbnb" listings, Airbnb-funded Lyric offerings, and huge numbers of listings from mega-host such as Sonder, Stay Alfred and Domio (currently "suspended for investigation" - not instantly banned, oddly - after being roundly exposed by the media for fraudulent activities and unethical/illegal business practices. Also widely rumoured to have a slightly more chummy 'relationship' with Airbnb than the regular 'platform/host' set-up) And what's happening in Nashville is being repeated all over the globe. We could, I suppose - if we were really naive - choose to believe that's all just transpiring organically.
So while the rather quaint but now increasingly historic concept of Airbnb being a somewhat shambolic but largely well-meaning entity that "has afforded countless individual people to make money in a whole new way that they never envisioned" was certainly once upon a time the reality for all - and arguably still is, for the minority of fortunate individual hosts who haven't personally been affected yet - the experience of hundreds of thousands of their fellow small hosts is a very different reality indeed (as evidenced by the daily flood on posts from traumatised and desperate hosts on this forum and many others) I'm quite certain that many of those hosts would equally regard Airbnb itself as also having a propensity for corruption, favoritism and control.
My 'cause', as you so cutely put it @Fred13, is simply to challenge the company narrative and to lay out the other side of the story. The real Airbnb story, that is, rather than the magical fairytale they're ubiquitously peddling now, with the sole aim of reeling in and seducing potential (and in many cases, unsuspecting) IPO investors - a great many of whom will inevitably be unsophisticated small-time RobinHood day-traders and mom-and-pop investors, perhaps risking their savings by taking a punt on what they may perceive as a noble, ethical, honourable company, and a sure-fire bet. My aim is merely to provide them with an alternative, more truthful, more realistic perspective on Airbnb so they can weigh up all angles and make more informed decisions, before they potentially lose their bollocks.
Hardly a crime, is it? And I'm sorry you're not a fan, but that's entirely your prerogative.
Penelope