There's an ongoing debate about how home-sharing sites like Airbnb are performing, and a new study from LearnAirbnb, a consultancy, casts some fresh light.
LearnAirbnb did a 119-page study of the home sharing industry, with market data on 430,000 US listings -- which is about a fifth of the 2 million listings that Airbnb says it has in the US.
Some of the hard data was culled by Everbooked, a pricing and market intelligence firm for property owners.
Here are some highlights:
- The median listing revenue nationwide for all hosts is $3,300 a year. Three out of every four listings earn modest total rental revenues of approximately $10,000 or less in a year. (The median numbers avoid the skewing of averages that happen due to the superhosts.)
- Four out of five Airbnb hosts have only a single listing, but in some markets, like Miami, as much as 10% have three or more listings.
- Superhosts (people who book 10 or more trips a year) make nearly double the average revenue of regular hosts.
- An elite of superhosts gross even more, with at least 75 US hosts identified as grossing more than $1 million in rental income per year.
- The top 1% of highest-grossing hosts made 19% of the overall bookings revenue in the sample.
- 29% of surveyed hosts have never been guests on Airbnb.
- Despite what the hotel industry says, the average annual occupancy of an Airbnb property is 17.1% -- far less than most hotels.
- Shared rooms, Airbnb's original mainstay, fare even worse -- 12.4% is their average annual occupancy.
The study also includes an attitudinal survey of more than 1,300 hosts across 83 countries, done in December 2015. That survey found:
- 59.2% of current hosts surveyed are home-sharing for supplemental income, but the number of those motivated to host for building wealth (16.9%) is growing. For 15.4%, it is a main source of income.
- Only the newbies are worried about security and stuff getting stolen — 18.5% of prospective hosts worry about it, but only 1.6% of actual hosts do.
- Most hosts say they are fine with paying taxes.
The report is free for download at
LearnAirbnb.
For context, see Tnooz's recent review of Airbnb performance data.
Earlier, from Tnooz: Everbooked brings Big Data to Airbnb rental management