Airbnb Plays a Minuscule Role in Rising City Rents
(Bloomberg View) -- I recently returned from a trip to Japan. I’ve been going there for many years, so I can confirm that traveling in that country -- especially for longer periods of time -- is infinitely easier than it was just a decade ago. One of the main reasons is Airbnb. Ten years ago, lodging in Japan was limited to overpriced hotels or unreliable Craigslist sublets. Now, with a few button clicks on a smartphone or laptop, you can book a reasonably priced, centrally located private apartment with all the furnishings of a well-kept Japanese home. A portable Wi-Fi unit is often included, allowing you to dispense with the need to pay for an international cell-phone data plan.
Airbnb’s success in Japan is due in large part to the government’s far-sighted embrace of the room-rental service. In mid-2017 the government passed a law legalizing Airbnb, subject to the approval of local authorities. Japanese apartment owners can rent out their rooms for up to 180 days out of the year -- much more than in many other cities. This leniency is just one factor powering a record boom in tourism to the Land of the Rising Sun:
It’s not just Japan, though -- Airbnb is probably making travel easier all over the world. A recent National Bureau of Economics Research working paper by Chiara Farronato and Andrey Fradkin used a simple supply-and-demand model of the short-term rental market to argue that Airbnb has held down hotel revenues, making short stays cheaper everywhere that the company operates. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue continues to increase rapidly.
But not everyone is happy about Airbnb’s rise. The hotel industry is understandably upset about intensified competition. Some long-term renters are also upset about the possibility of having a rotating cast of potentially noisy, disruptive or even criminal houseguests flowing into and out of their buildings. And, perhaps most importantly, many cities and their residents are worried that Airbnb and similar services are pushing up rents.
The mechanism is simple. Each apartment or house reserved for Airbnb rentals means one less unit for long-term residents. By taking supply off the market, Airbnb could potentially raise costs. Even a small rent increase could be politically explosive, given the rent crisis in big cities and technology hubs such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
It’s hard to measure how big Airbnb’s impact really is, though. McGill University urban planning professor David Wachsmuth recently looked at New York and concluded that Airbnb listings were rising in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods such as Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where rents have also been skyrocketing. But this could mostly be a coincidence -- travelers may enjoy staying in hip, up-and-coming neighborhoods, or new urban pioneers may start offering Airbnb rentals as they move in.
As evidence that Airbnb is actually driving rent increases, Wachsmuth cites a very recent paper by economists Kyle Barron, Edward Kung and Davide Proserpio. Barron et al. reason that if a given area is a big draw for tourists, with lots of eating and drinking places, and that if that area receives a sudden surge in online search interest for Airbnb, then any subsequent jump in Airbnb is caused by increased demand from visitors for short-term rentals.
Under this assumption, Barron et al. find that the true impact of Airbnb on rents is very small. A 1 percent increase in Airbnb listings, they found, raises rents by only 0.018 percent. That’s a minuscule effect. It means that doubling the number of Airbnb listings would raise rent by less than 2 percent overall. The effect is so small that in their presentation at the American Economic Association meeting in January, the authors referred to it as a “zero effect on rental rates” overall (though the effect isn’t necessarily zero in all areas).
This means that the advent of Airbnb probably doesn’t require much of a policy change. Its small impact can easily be canceled out by simply building a bit more housing. Tokyo itself has done this, with great success.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. Barron et al. also find that one reason Airbnb’s impact is so small is that most people offering rentals are owner-occupiers sharing their own residences, rather than commercial operators operating fly-by-night mini-hotels. If cities allow the latter, the effect on rents will probably be bigger.
One approach is to do what New York has done, and simply ban commercial Airbnb operators. But, given the benefits for travelers, a smarter approach might be to allow commercial Airbnb operation but to tax and regulate it like the hotel industry. Buildings that allow commercial Airbnb operations could be required to advertise this fact to potential tenants, and commercial Airbnb operators could be required to follow cleaning and safety procedures similar to those used by bed and breakfasts. Finally, a tax could be applied to commercial Airbnb operation, with the proceeds used to fund affordable housing.
Allowing regulated commercial Airbnb operation would allow travelers like me to enjoy a more home-like alternative to hotels, while mitigating or eliminating negative impacts on locals -- a win-win situation.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net.
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