Renting an apartment out on Airbnb as a de-facto hotel just doesn’t pencil out like it used to.
In order to break even with the average annual rent for a long-term lease, an Airbnb host would have to rent an apartment on the home-sharing site for an average of 216 days, up from 194 days in 2012, according to a new study.
Researchers at New York University, along with economists from Airbnb, conducted the study to help inform the public policy debate on short-term rental sites, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“You’ve got to be really successful at doing it and you have to really dedicate yourself to doing it, given the costs,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, on of the report’s authors and a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “For most it’s not going to be worth it.”
The NYU professors said they weren’t paid for the study, which also shows that the share of entire homes rented in New York City fell to 53 percent last year from 68 percent in 2011.
The shift could be a result of more regulatory scrutiny, including a law the state passed year putting in place a $7,500 penalty for advertising a short-term rental in a building with fewer than three units on sites like Airbnb.
The San Francisco-based startup, meanwhile, is partnering with Miami-based Newgard Development Group on an Airbnb-branded apartment building as it tries to get cozy with landlords and property managers. [WSJ] – Rich Bockmann