For the first time, Airbnb has publicly released detailed data on its New York City rentals.
The report appears to dispel a common criticism that the site is being used as a platform for illegal hotels.
According to the data, 95 percent of hosts renting an entire home listed just one property and 75 percent of the total revenue generated from entire home rentals come from hosts with one or two listings. This suggests that the vast majority of hosts are people renting out their own homes and that genuine users, not illegal hotels, are generating most of the revenue.
The anonymized data covers all active Airbnb listings in New York City as of November 17, 2015, and every listing that hosted a trip in the past year. “We hope this data and information will inform everyone who cares about home sharing in New York and look forward to working with policymakers in a constructive fashion as we move forward,” said an Airbnb statement.
Airbnb released a summary of the annual data in a blog post Tuesday. It includes data on the location, revenue earned, length of stay and type of listings. To get full access to the data you need to visit Airbnb’s New York office, but to save you the trip, we summarized the most interesting points below.
Renters make $5,110 on average
The median annual income for a NYC Airbnb listing is $5,110. Manhattan renters earn the most (median of $6,558) and hosts in the Bronx the least (median of $3,249).
Concentrated in Manhattan and Brooklyn
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority (91 percent) of the nearly 36,000 active listings were in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Staten Island had 204 listings, but The Bronx had only slightly more with 431. The top three neighborhoods for listings were Williamsburg in Brooklyn, followed by Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village.
Shared spaces rented more often than entire homes
The median number of days per year for entire homes to be rented is 42, but rises to 63 for private rooms and shared spaces. On average rooms are rented out five days per month and homes just 3.5 days. In Staten Island shared spaces are rented 3 times more often than entire homes.
Homes in Manhattan, rooms in outer boroughs
Entire home rentals outnumber shared spaces in Manhattan, but the opposite is true in all the outer boroughs. Manhattan has 11,996 active entire home listings compared to 6,790 for private rooms or shared spaces. In Brooklyn it’s pretty even, but The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island all have significantly more individual room listings than entire homes.
Image via Shutterstock
Have any New York tech news you'd like to share? Send an email to [email protected].
