Retired artists Toby Klayman and Joe Branchcomb, both 81, host on Airbnb. They’ve had “a fantastic amount of marvelous people stay in our spare room,” said Klayman, whose vivid abstracts decorate their longtime Bernal Heights home. “We absolutely love Airbnb. It impacts our style of living enormously to have an extra $1,600 a month or so to pay the bills.” The lovefest is mutual — so much so that the vacation-rental company features the couple in ad campaigns. Klayman and Branchcomb embody the image Airbnb wants to project of its hosts: regular people making extra income and forging international friendships.
A different image of Airbnb is put forth by housing activists — a graphic portrait of rapacious landlords who evict tenants in favor of lucrative short-term rentals, turning badly needed housing into tourist hotels. Nine years after its origin as crash space on inflatable beds in a SoMa bachelor pad, Airbnb is a runaway success story with a $30 billion valuation and some 2.3 million rooms — far exceeding any hotel chain.
But its breakneck growth is hitting regulatory roadblocks worldwide. Airbnb’s relationship with its hometown is particularly fraught. It’s a flash point for raging debates about the city’s housing crisis, gentrification, “disruptive” businesses and tech companies’ civic impact. The company is now suing the city, joined by rival HomeAway, over San Francisco’s attempt to enforce a vacation-rental law that Airbnb itself helped write. Airbnb says San Francisco has gone too far by putting it and its rivals on the hook for severe penalties when their hosts don’t register with the city — a requirement that most hosts flout.
Airbnb’s impact here isn’t easy to quantify. The company cherry-picks data and anecdotes that burnish its profile, while staying mum about specifics that would reveal just how many homes are being turned into full-time hotels. The Chronicle’s third annual dive into listings data on Airbnb shows that visitors continue to flock to the rentals and that an increasing number of locals offer them — often in defiance of city requirements to register these impromptu inns and limit how often they rent whole homes to travelers.
While Airbnb’s listings long ago leapfrogged those of older rivals HomeAway and FlipKey, those companies also have a healthy presence here, albeit one that’s harder to pinpoint as their websites aren’t as cleanly organized. Airbnb has 5,504 active properties in San Francisco, of which about 58 percent are entire homes. HomeAway and FlipKey experienced big surges in their numbers of local listings, to 1,313 and 915, respectively. Our analysis showed that Airbnb is living up to a promise it made in April to purge hosts with multiple properties if they were commercial operators. About 25 percent fewer entire homes controlled by multiple operators appeared on the site this year. However, in New York after the company weeded out hundreds of multiple-operators, independent researchers said it was manipulating its data to influence legislation and noted that some of the listings soon reappeared on the site.
Accelerating growth
Data firm Connotate extracted information from the websites of Airbnb, HomeAway and FlipKey in mid-May, the same time we extracted similar data in 2015 from all three sites and from Airbnb in 2014. At first glance, Airbnb’s listings and prices appeared to have surged dramatically in the 12 months. However, a couple of thousand listings were Super Bowl wannabes — people who listed between November and the big game in February, some asking for thousand-dollar rents for a night in San Francisco without necessarily finding any takers. Removing all locations that had zero reviews — indicating that they probably drew no visitors — revealed a different story.
We removed zero-review listings for previous years to get an apples-to-apples comparison of growth. Airbnb’s active listings grew a healthy 29 percent, from 4,258 a year ago to 5,504. Growth from 2014 to 2015 was 21 percent. Prices averaged across all property types (whole homes, private rooms and shared rooms) were static at $197 per night. Entire homes showed a tad more price growth, rising 5 percent from $248 to $261.
FlipKey, a subsidiary of TripAdvisor, saw even more dramatic growth. It vaulted from 359 listings last year to 915. Expedia’s HomeAway (which also owns VRBO and shows the same listings on both sites) grew 31 percent from 1,001 listings to 1,313.
