@Ute42 @Robin4
The figures quoted above (650K hosts, 7 million listings) are Airbnb's own figures @Ute42, and highly likely to we wildly inaccurate, and greatly inflated. (The rest of the stats included in the link that Rob provided have been cobbled together from a variety of sources - some reasonably accurate, some much less so, and others already outdated.. Airbnb's most recent valuation (this week) stands at just $18 billion, for instance, rather than the all-time high of $38 billion, as per the stats in the link.
In the historical and continued absence of Airbnb releasing any real, authentic data though - and taking into account that some of the alternative data sources are pushing their own agendas too - we can really only speculate as to the true state of affairs in Airbnb-land, and reach our own conclusions based on what we're seeing. hearing and living.
For example, according to the company, 92 percent of hosts in New York shared their primary residence between 2017 and 2018, and 79 percent of hosts used the money they earned to stay in their homes.
However, data supplied by David Wachsmuth, Professor of Urban Planning at Mcgill University, highlighted that the far more pertinent and revealing figure is the huge amount of money the smaller number of "Pro"/commercial operators are bringing in. Overall, his data suggested that half of all Airbnb rentals were conducted by only 10 percent of hosts, who earned a full 48 percent of all the revenue earned in the city that year. That was some 5,000-people earning a combined $318 million. In contrast, the bottom 80 percent of New York’s hosts—the city’s 40,400 true home sharers—earned just 32 percent of all revenue, or $209 million, in 2017 (with the situation being infinitely worse in 2020)
Similarly, the 10 biggest hosts in Barcelona manage 996 apartments between them, while a further 666 manage five or more, and 3,633 host between two and four, a 2018 report by DataHippo found.
An excellent and hard-hitting 2019 CBC series of investigations into rogue hosts in Montreal, discovered that just 10% of Airbnb hosts received 63% of the reviews on the listings there. In other words, a group of just 568 host most of the travellers to Montreal who use Airbnb, and earn most of the revenue generated through the platform.
More recently in 2020, a March article by Wired's digital editor James Temperton (by far and away, one of the most savvy and clued-up reporters producing well-researched material on Airbnb at the moment) states that new data, compiled by City Hall in late 2019, shows that across all Airbnb listings in London, just one per cent of the capital’s hosts behind 15 per cent of the listings active on Airbnb at the time.
So while all Airbnb-related data does need to be scrutinised carefully, and often taken with a pinch of salt, there is an overwhelming amount of pretty reliable evidence out there to suggest that "professional" hosts with vast inventories are indeed dominating - and decimating - the platform.
We don't need millions of data points and complex algorithms and small armies of super-smart data-analysts to tell us that though - all we need is a pen, a notepad, a bit of patience and an hour or two studying Airbnb search placements in any saturated (or even emerging) market, to see exactly how the land lies.
James Temperton. Airbnb Has Devoured London, And Here's The Data To Prove It
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-london-short-term-rentals
