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What are the demographics of Airbnb hosts?
According to the data we found, 3,488,000 properties on Airbnb are owned by hosts who have multiple properties, and could potentially be contributing to neighborhood gentrification. This represents 87.2% of Airbnb listings. Below, please find the exact methods we used to arrive at this conclusion, along with additional data about Airbnb users.
Number of Airbnb Empires
According to the most recent data available from Airbnb, there are approximately 4 million listings on the site, which are owned by 640,000 hosts.
We also know that about 80% of hosts own only a single listing on Airbnb. 80% of 640,000 hosts is 512,000 hosts, and since we know that each of these hosts has only a single property listed on the site, we know that 512,000 properties are owned by "non-empire" hosts.
To find the number of properties that are owned by "empire" hosts, we can simply subtract this number from the 4 million total.
4,000,000 - 512,000 = 3,488,000
This represents 87.2% of all properties, which means that 20% of Airbnb hosts own the vast majority of listings. We used this equation to find the percentage:
3,488,000 / 4,000,000 * 100 = 87.2%
City-Specific Data
The percentage of Airbnb listings that are empire-owned vary by location. The United States remains Airbnb's biggest market, with 660,000 listings within its borders, and in New York, 94% of Airbnb hosts own two properties or fewer, which means that 6% of hosts own three or more properties. Inside Airbnb reports that 25.7% of listings are from hosts with multiple listings.
In Airbnb's second biggest market within the United States, Los Angeles, more listings are part of empires, with 47.4% of listings being from hosts with multiple listings.
In one of the bigger non-U.S. markets, London, a reported 40.9% of listings are from hosts with multiple listings.
Hotels
In 2017, Airbnb reported that their hosts include "at least" 15,000 boutique hoteliers. However, they did not report how many of these hotels have just one room listed versus how many have multiple rooms listed, so we can't be sure how many rooms these hoteliers represent or if the number should be subtracted from the "empire" number or the "non-empire" number. Many boutique hotels are extremely small, so it is likely that some of them only have one listing.
Other Interesting Stats
According to Forbes, a study by LeanAirbnb showed that at least 75 Airbnb hosts are making $1 million or more.
Furthermore, the top 1% of hosts account for 8% of listings on the site and 19% of total booking revenue for the company.
Given this information, we can calculate that the top 6,400 hosts own 320,000 of the listings on Airbnb, an average of 50 listings per host. Here are the calculations used to triangulate:
320,000 listings / 6,400 hosts = 50 listings per hosts
Please notes that this is an average, but not a median number, so a few hosts in the top 1% with thousands of listings could be skewing the numbers in this case.
Conclusion
To summarize, hosts with multiple listings dominate the Airbnb market. 3,488,000, or about 87.2% of Airbnb listings in total are from hosts with multiple listings, though this number does vary by location, and we were not able to eliminate hotel numbers from these calculations due to lack of data. They top 1% of hosts account for 8% of listings, though again, this does not account for hotel listings due to lack of data available about hotels using Airbnb.