Owners with multiple Airbnb listings ‘running a business’: study author

Airbnb operators in Montreal with multiple listings earn the bulk of overall revenue while diverting housing stock from the rental market, according to a new study from McGill University.

“They’re running a business; they’re not homeowners who are just renting their homes when they’re going away for the weekend,” said David Wachsmuth, the study’s lead author and a professor in the School of Urban Planning.

His study, Short-term Cities: Airbnb’s Impact on Canadian Housing Markets, was released on Tuesday. It differentiates between hosts renting out spare rooms on occasion and “full-time” operators who list entire properties for much of the year. “If you’re renting a place for two or more months and it’s available for four or more months,” Wachsmuth said, “it’s very hard to reconcile that with having a full-time tenant.”

The study found nearly 14,000 entire properties are rented for 60 days or more per year on Airbnb in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Montreal has the most active listings of those three cities. This, Wachsmuth suggests, is partly because of lower real estate prices.

The study suggests Airbnb activity in Montreal is concentrated in the Plateau and Ville-Marie neighbourhoods, where two to three per

cent of the housing stock is used for “full-time” listings. That figure, he said, closely tracks those neighbourhoods’ vacancy rates.

Since Airbnb does not release its booking information, the study used data scraped or estimated by analytics firm AirDNA.

“The author of this study has a history of manipulating scraped data to misrepresent Airbnb hosts,” Airbnb spokesperson Lindsey Scully said in an email.