Choose an Airbnb That Looks Like a Real Home
Breakdown is a mess. That’s the point – businesses are rethinking the rules of their industry and forcing everyone, including customers, to fight and regroup. Now your every purchase turns into a choice between two types of savings. Buy all of your books on Amazon and your local bookstore may disappear; order Seamless and – what !? – your local restaurant can go broke . Rent Airbnb and yes, you raise your rent. But, says Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, not much .
Airbnb hasn’t done much damage to the hospitality business, Thompson said, as the tourism industry has grown enough to more than offset new competition. But Airbnb has found another unintended competitor: anyone renting a home. Now that every living space is a potential Airbnb lease, anyone who owns a property can rent it out through Airbnb (or from competitors like Homeaway) instead of renting it out to a long-term resident. When you rent Airbnb, especially a full-time Airbnb, it gets a little harder for the people around you to live there.
But not much, says Thompson. He points to a FiveThirtyEight article that compares Airbnb’s count to total rental apartments . For example, as of 2016, Airbnb leases just 30,800 of New York City’s 2.2 million apartments, including 2,500 full-time commercial rental apartments. [UPDATE Feb 21, 10:20 am: The original version of this post incorrectly states the number of rented apartments in NYC.] This is not a small change and it is definitely growing, but it is not as important a factor as building more units or moving people to urban areas.
This does not mean that nothing will change! Literally every disruptive startup started with a tiny market share. Amazon couldn’t always get the publisher to lower prices , Uber and Lyft weren’t always powerful enough to hold back their drivers , and Facebook couldn’t always count on you coming back day after day. The bigger Airbnb gets, the more it will affect local rentals. And the company hasn’t spent billions of dollars in venture funding to stay small. Every time you give them your money, you help them expand in their hometown too.
Of course, you also transfer the money to the owner. One study found that renting from a resident does not increase home prices as much as renting from an absent homeowner.
So if ethics is your thing, rent the space from the person who lives there, not from the person who owns the entire building and rents it out full time. You will not hurt local tenants as much, and you may be less unhappy with your neighbors.
Airbnb and the unintended consequences of “disruption” | Atlantic Ocean