Amid Airbnb Battles in New York City, Some Hotel Prices Decrease
There's an Airbnb listing down there somewhere. Joakim Lloyd Raboff / Shutterstock.com
And a new interactive map shows just how big the short-term rental company is getting in the Big Apple.
NEW YORK — As tensions over the sharing economy continue to simmer in the nation’s largest city, a new analysis is showing how short-term rental service Airbnb is squeezing certain sectors of the local hotel industry.
As Quartz detailed this week, Credit Suisse analysts wrote about the pressure that boutique hotels are feeling from travelers and tourists turning to Airbnb for lodging:
We are hearing hotel operators more often cite emerging sources of distribution/supply such as Airbnb as placing pressure on marginal locations, independents, and less well known boutiques . . . Bookings in three Manhattan districts include the Lower East Side/Chinatown, Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen, and Greenwich Village/SoHo accounted for more than 40 % of private revenue during a recent review period.
The apparent decrease in New York City hotel room rates is certainly welcome news for visitors, but is likely to make hotel operators grumble, along with Airbnb’s opponents on the New York City Council looking at more regulations and activists in neighborhoods decrying quality-of-life issues associated with short-term Airbnb guests.
There are plenty of Airbnb options for visitors headed to the city.
As The Verge points out, a new interactive map of Airbnb listings in New York City put together by Murray Cox on the website Inside Airbnb, “shows a city dense with apartments that are ‘highly available,’ which Cox defines as open for renting for 60 days or more. Eighty-four percent of the full-apartment listings on the site are highly available. Furthermore, 29.3 percent of listings are run by hosts with multiple properties.”
Murray pulled the data from Airbnb’s listings, which the company says are out of date, The Verge reported. Last year, the San Francisco-based company banned 2,000 users in New York City.
A report by New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released last year found that 72 percent of Airbnb listings in New York City were illegal, either violating housing regulations or were units run by commercial ventures using the Airbnb platform.
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