As vacation rental giant Airbnb works out its sometimes thorny relationships with cities, it’s had to talk numbers, and some of them are surprising. An Airbnb-commissioned report submitted to Amsterdam’s city council as it considers new regulations on short-term rentals.
The new rules would reduce the number of days a homeowner could legally rent, limit or ban rentals in some areas, and treat rule-breaking as a fiscal crime connected to tax evasion.
Airbnb’s report, prepared by consultant Ecorys, identifies 800,000 short-term rentals last year, with an average stay of 3.4 days, for a total of about 2.5 million nights. The 3.4 days is almost twice as long as the average for hotels or guest houses.
The report says that Airbnb accounts for about 11.9% of overnight stays in the city, and that while the proposed new limits (30 days per year of legal rental compared to 60 now) might result in 310,000 fewer rental nights, new hotels in the pipeline will add capacity for 3.7 million overnights by 2022.
Airbnb also argues that its available apartments are spread over a wider stretch of the city than hotels are, thereby reducing the impact of tourism on neighborhood ‘social cohesion’ and housing prices, two issues involved in the council’s decision to limit or ban rentals in the Red Light District and several others.
