This year has been an eventful one for short-term rentals around the world: The boom-bust saga and seeming unending fights about new regulations.
06.12.2023 - 04:24 / skift.com / Kyriakos Mitsotakis / Srividya Kalyanaraman
Happy Tuesday, folks! Welcome to a brand new week.
For Skift.com this week, I’ve published reporting and analysis on Florida’s short-term rental market (your feedback is welcome and wanted,). The key takeaway: Demand is up, but so is supply, and costs have surged. That’s pressuring revenue and taking a big bite out of profits.
Still, there’s a lot we didn’t get to in that article. Studying the short-term rental market in Florida should be a required reading for everyone invested and interested in the industry. Here are some critical issues investors face:
German vacation rental marketplace HomeToGo has announced an inaugural share buyback program valued at up to €10 million ($10.6 million). The company’s supervisory board has granted approval, and it will be conducted following authorization at the shareholders’ meeting.
The program allows for the repurchase of up to 5.7 million HomeToGo shares between September 18, 2023, and December 31, 2024. In line with shareholder meeting authorization, the management board has set an initial price limit of €3.16 per share for repurchase (excluding ancillary costs). As of June 30, 2023, the company possesses €145 million ($154 million) in gross cash and €139 million ($148 million) in net cash.
The city of Juneau in Alaska has streamlined the registration process for short-term rental properties with a new online form. The move follows the adoption of an ordinance on July 10, requiring short-term rental operators to register their properties with the city’s sales tax office.
This initiative aims to enhance communication with rental operators, ensure equitable sales tax compliance, and assess the impact of short-term rentals on Juneau’s housing availability. The registration requirement is effective on October 8, 2023, with a daily non-compliance penalty of $25, motivating operators to register promptly and avoid fines.
Blueground, the property management company that operates furnished 30-plus-day rentals, told Skift that it has witnessed a 30% rise in its student community due to limited housing options and a desire for comfortable and flexible living.
Hence, the company has introduced Studentground, offering students access to its 15,000+ premium furnished apartments worldwide. The program includes tailored features like pausing rent during summer breaks and flexible lease terms. Top destinations so far include Paris, Berlin, Boston, New York, and London.
Greece plans to bolster its budget for climate change-related natural disasters by doubling its reserve, raising it from €300 million to €600 million ($320 million to $641 million), Bloomberg reported. Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced this decision following a series of extreme weather
This year has been an eventful one for short-term rentals around the world: The boom-bust saga and seeming unending fights about new regulations.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour made headlines even before it began — by overwhelming booking platform Ticketmaster and drawing attention even from the U.S. Senate.
Dealmaking has kept short-term rental businesses in Europe busy. The past few months have seen an uptick in activity — be it mergers, or acquisitions or rebrandings.
Booking Holdings Chief Financial Officer David Goulden said this week that the flagship Booking.com brand launched its short-term rental business as a supplement to hotels “15-plus years” ago, which is roughly around the time Airbnb got going in San Francisco.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks! I know you’d rather carve a turkey than open your inbox, so we will keep this brief.
You read it here first: We’re halfway into the year, and the short-term rental industry has been buoyed by summer travel picking up, despite prevailing economic uncertainty.
Stat of the Day: Thinking that you, like us, are wondering what’s happening to occupancy levels this summer, we had some numbers crunched for us by data analysis firm Beyond Pricing and this is what it found: U.S. occupancy for July is pacing about 5 percentage points down year-on-year, from 37 percent in 2022 to 32 percent in 2023.
New This Morning: Following extensive discussions within the community spanning almost four years regarding short-term rental homes, the Dallas City Council implemented zoning limitations to prohibit their presence in single-family neighborhoods last week. However, as a middle ground, short-term rentals will still be permitted in commercial areas and multi-family neighborhoods.
If you’ve seen a tweetstorm about the alleged “Airbnb collapse” and are wondering if the data seems too dramatic – you’re not alone, or even wrong.
If you’ve read the various hot takes on the state of the housing market as indexed by Airbnb revenue, here are a few concerns you can put to rest. What will happen to the housing market in a recession is anybody’s guess, but speaking purely of Airbnb as a stock, the company has a few things going for it.
The short-term rental market in Miami isn’t so hot this summer. And there are a number of reasons for that: A slowing of the post-Covid vacation rush, the Florida government’s hostility toward the LGBTQ community, and travelers’ financial constraints due to inflation are a few contributing factors.