At first, Airbnb grew slowly in London. By 2012, four years after it first launched, there were only a few hundred rentals in the capital each week. Then, in 2014, word started to spread. That year, there were approximately 90,000 rentals in the city.
But it wasn't until 2015 that Airbnb really took off in London, as our new visualisation, shown below, illustrates. Based on data scraped from Airbnb’s site, it shows the startup's seemingly unstoppable advance, with around 215,000 rentals in 2015, followed by around 480,000 the following year.
Based on current growth, Airbnb has probably already made its millionth London booking. As of spring last year, it was on 935,000 – and, while it showed some signs of slowing in central London, its growth in the city’s outer boroughs remained strong.
The data comes from InsideAirbnb, a non-commercial website which tracks Airbnb reviews in cities across the world, and has been depicted using Flourish, a Google News Lab- and Local Globe-backed visualisation tool, which launched yesterday.
“The London data visualised here consists of 666,250 reviews left on the site between the company’s launch and spring last year,” says Flourish co-founder Duncan Clark. “This equates to around a million actual rentals [since Airbnb’s founder says that, on average, 72 per cent of stays are reviewed] and around £380 million of revenue based on Airbnb’s figure of an average stay in London of 4.6 nights.”
A study from property services company Colliers – also based on scraped data, this time from commercial analysts AirDNA – suggested that Airbnb’s market share in London nearly tripled in 2017, jumping from 2.8 to 7.6 per cent of overnight stays.
"Despite the 90-day rental cap, London was one the highest growth major markets in 2017," says AirDNA founder Scott Shatford. "It will continue to see strong growth as business travellers migrate from hotels and Airbnb units are available at a significant discount."
Airbnb disputes the accuracy of scraped data, but does not release publicly-accessible datasets to support its claims. Its UK Insights Report said that around two million guests had stayed at 64,000 London listings between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, growth of 49 per cent.
The InsideAirbnb data reveals other trends. In 2016, for example, the number of stays with hosts who rent more than one property trebled, showing the increase of Airbnb-ing as a professionalised activity. This echoes the finding of a recent McGill University study on short-term rentals in New York City, which claimed that 48 per cent of all revenue in 2017 went to the top ten per cent of hosts.
The study, which was commissioned by two hotel trade unions, also showed that Airbnb was spreading out from the centre of New York City and into residential boroughs. Giovanni Quattrone and Daniele Quercia, computer scientists who study Airbnb, say it’s likely to be the same in London. “The pattern is very very similar,” says Quattrone.
The fear is that these properties are removed from the housing supply, piling extra pressure on the strained residential property market, while undermining existing residents' quality of life. The McGill study, which was commissioned by two hotel trade unions, estimated that Airbnb had taken between 7,000 and 13,500 housing units off the market in New York City.
“Most of this housing lost comes from entire-home Airbnb listings which are rented frequently enough that they can't have a primary resident,” wrote lead author David Wachsmuth.
The hope is that, as it spreads, Airbnb brings tourists into a wider range of areas. “Airbnb is allowing tourists where there are no hotels,” Quercia says. “You want to have distribution of people that are spending locally and Airbnb is allowing that.”
Read more: What it's really like living next door to an Airbnb
To ease the pressure on city housing, and reduce the impact on local communities, the UK government introduced a law in 2015 making it illegal to let short-term residential properties for more than 90 nights a year. In response, Airbnb introduced an “automated hosting limit”, which blocks out a host’s calendar for the year once they have reached 90 days of rentals for a single property.
However, councils argue this has made little difference, as there is nothing to prevent hosts either changing the name of the listing – from Flat 1 to Flat A, for instance – or jumping onto another platform once they’ve reached their limit on Airbnb.
"It is hard to argue there has been any impact as the so called 90-day limit can easily be circumnavigated," a spokesperson for Westminster council says.
Airbnb disagrees, calling its measure a “success”, and citing internal data showing that the number of entire homes shared on the platform for more than 90 days decreased by two thirds (from 21 per cent to seven per cent) since it was introduced in January 2017. If there's a problem, the US firm's representatives suggest, it's down to other rental platforms to provide a solution.
“Airbnb is the only platform that works with London to promote the rules and limit how often hosts can share their homes,” says a spokesperson for the company. “Politicians should stop turning a blind-eye to the activities of companies like Booking.com and TripAdvisor, which need to step-up and follow our lead."
Booking.com says it is working with "many governments across Europe." TripAdvisor did not respond to a request for comment.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
