Vying for an even larger-slice of the short-term rental market, Airbnb is in talks for a new funding round that would value the startup at $30 billion, according to a new report.
Terms of the round would triple Airbnb’s valuation in two years and make it the second-highest-valued startup in the U.S., behind Uber, the New York Times reported. The San Francisco-based company plans to use the funds to ramp up growth, specifically targeting international markets.
The new funding round also comes on the heels of a $1 billion debt facility, previously reported by Bloomberg.
The San Francisco-based company has been aggressively expanding, and it opened operations in Cuba last year. It currently operates in 34,000 cities.
But Airbnb has rankled developers and elected officials in New York, where state law makes it illegal to rent an apartment for less than 30 days.
Earlier this week, Airbnb — which has gone toe-to-toe with the city of San Francisco, too — sued the city in an attempt to block it from fining Airbnb for unregistered apartment rentals on its site. The city of San Francisco also wants Airbnb to remove listings from the site that are not registered, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In New York City, roughly 2,400 to 4,600 units, or about 8 to 17 percent of all Airbnb listings, were operated as commercial units, according to a back-of-the-envelope analysis by The Real Deal in 2015.
A pair of housing advocacy groups this week released a report that more than 8,000 New York City listings were rented out as virtual hotels. If those apartments were listed on the open market, they would boost the city’s rental stock by 10 percent, according to a report commissioned by MFY Legal Services and Housing Conservation Coordinators. [NYT] – E.B. Solomont