Airbnb’s Talking Points About Individual Hosts Hit a Reality Check
25.08.2023 - 14:30
/ skift.com
/ Dennis Schaal
/ Dave Stephenson
When pressed about an analytics company report that found 38 percent of Airbnb hosts offered only one listing, an Airbnb spokesperson countered this week, without elaboration, that “the vast majority of active Airbnb hosts are sharing just one home as single-listing hosts.”
That statement, which conflicts with an AirDNA report about the nature of Airbnb’s 6.3 million active listings as of October, seemed to be a concession when measured against Airbnb’s perennial drumbeat of statements since at least the prelude to its 2020 IPO that 90 percent of Airbnb hosts are individuals.
The issue is an important one because many Airbnb guests crave a local experience from an individual host, and these hosts are also sensitive to the fact that property managers have undoubtably gained share in bookings on Airbnb in recent years versus solo hosts. Airbnb knows that guests want that person-to-person and guest-to-host experience.
As recently as last month, Airbnb Chief Financial Officer Dave Stephenson cited the 90 percent host figure when speaking with financial analysts. “If you go back and think about the 4 million hosts that we have, we have a very different business than many others. So 90 percent of those hosts are individual hosts.”
It’s interesting that despite all of the disruption and havoc since the pandemic, the individual versus property manager hosting balance as a percentage hasn’t changed at all on Airbnb, according to the company. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky in February said: “Nearly 90 percent of our hosts are individuals. They’re school teachers, health care workers, students. Our hosts have earned over $150 billion since we started and 55 percent of them are women.”
One of the issues at play is that if you assume — like this reporter initially did — that “individual hosts” on Airbnb are people who own or control one or two properties, then you’d be wrong. Airbnb defines individual hosts as people who don’t use property management software so they could have 15 or 20 listings and still be an individual host, in Airbnb’s view.
But how many of the aforementioned healthcare workers, teachers and students do you know who have the wealth to own or control 15 to 20 homes or other properties? If they are operating 20 Airbnbs, they obviously have crossed over into running or working for a property management business.
In its S-1 statement in December 2020 prior to the IPO, Airbnb stated: “As of December 31, 2019, 90 percent of our hosts were individual hosts, and 79 percent of those hosts had just a single listing.”
I haven’t heard Airbnb cite the 79 percent single listing number — or any single listing number — in recent years as the company has defaulted to constantly mentioning that 90 percent of