Why is Airbnb afraid of the truth?
Airbnb, the global homesharing site, is suddenly declaring that it is shocked — shocked! — that a report from my office has suggested that the company’s thousands of daily listings are serving to drive up rents in New York City by taking otherwise affordable apartments off the market.
The company’s flacks are even warning — in threatening letters and malicious Twitter rants — that our data may have been “manipulated” or “improperly obtained” by some nefarious, unnamed third party.
To which I say to Airbnb: Your arguments are as overheated as they are underwhelming. And while you’re at it, it’s time to change up your reflexively defensive playbook.
Any Google search will reveal that Airbnb’s high-priced lobbyists are doing what they always do when confronted with facts they don’t like, which is hold press conferences to try to smear those who dare to question the company’s impact on cities. It’s the same slash-and-burn strategy they’ve used around the globe, from Paris to Berlin to San Francisco and beyond.
In each one of those cities, the conversation about rising rents and Airbnb has been the same because the basic law of supply and demand knows no borders. If you reduce the supply of once-affordable apartments, demand for those apartments that remain will rise and drive up prices.
And that was the crux of our report: after examining publicly available data on Airbnb listings in New York City, and using the kind of straightforward regression model employed by academics and economists around the world to eliminate other factors that contribute to rising rents — such as population growth, household incomes and the like — we concluded that about 9% of the overall rent increase in New York City in recent years could be attributed to Airbnb.
Not 100%. Not even 50%. Nine percent. Significant? Yes. The cause of all our city’s problems? No.
And let’s be very clear — Airbnb’s absurd suggestion that the controller’s office used “improperly obtained” or “manipulated” data is a desperate, baldfaced lie told by people who should know better. Our analysis was based on publicly available, zip code-level data drawn by my office’s staffers directly from AirDNA, a private company that tracks Airbnb listings.
Like any report we do, our data are publicly available so that the conspiracy theorists at Airbnb — and everyone else — can see it.
Finally, Airbnb claims we “misinterpreted” the data and didn’t take into account the length of time a unit was actually booked (information, by the way, it hasn’t made publicly available).
But in our analysis, the length of time was simply not relevant. We measured the average effect of all types and durations of Airbnb bookings, whether one night or many months.
What mattered in our analysis was not whether someone was using Airbnb for one or two nights a month, or running an illegal hotel — what mattered was the concentration of Airbnb listings in a neighborhood.
A higher concentration of Airbnb listings would tend to push rents higher for any number of reasons — because tenants think they can make some money on Airbnb and hence afford a higher rent; because landlords think their tenants can make some money and thus charge a higher rent, or simply because there are fewer apartments available to rent than there would otherwise have been.
If the company actually cared about real New Yorkers, it would provide the city with the raw data necessary to weed out illegal postings, rather than cherry-picking anonymized data that it knows make enforcement impossible.
Instead, it fights back against legitimate governmental efforts to hold it accountable — like last month, when the company forced Mayor de Blasio to go to court rather than comply with a subpoena for records related to a Chelsea building that is allegedly operating as an illegal Airbnb hotel — using rent-stabilized apartments that should be affordable homes for New Yorkers.
Airbnb needs to stop distracting and release the raw data on its New York City users. That’s how you protect the marketplace for those homeowners who use the platform legally. In the meantime, we in the controller’s office will continue to do our work to make sure New York City is a place where everyone can afford to put down roots and raise their families, and we will not back down because of baseless threats from special-interest lobbyists.