Study says large commercial players dominating Airbnb; online room renting service dismisses
A study named "Short-term Cities: Airbnb’s Impact on Canadian Housing Markets", which was carried out to analyse the Airbnb activity, found out maximum revenues in cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are drawn by the large commercial operators as they are leading the short-term rentals.
Apart from this, the report suggested regular people who used to share their home through Airbnb in order to pay their mortgage amount are making way for the full time, entire-home listings category, which belong to the hosts having multiple properties.
In this way, the operators who are giving their entire home for rents, are benefiting.
The research work stated there is a huge growth in the revenue earned by the full time, entire-home listings category in last one year.
Statistically, the revenue amount from the particular category was one-third more than the total revenue collected as a whole.
The author of the report, professor David Wachsmuth told the Star: "More and more of the money is being earned by a smaller and (a) more kind of commercialized and sophisticated, large-scale set of hosts."
However, the Airbnb spokesperson Lindsey Scully disapproved the conclusion of the report.
Rubbishing the claims made by the research work, Scully told the Star: "The author of this study has a history of manipulating scraped data to misrepresent Airbnb hosts, the vast majority of whom are middle-class Canadian families sharing their homes to earn a bit of additional income to help pay the bills."
"The fact is, just 760 Airbnb entire home listings, or 0.07 per cent of the entire housing stock in Toronto, are rented frequently enough to outcompete a long-term rental, undercutting the author’s baseless conclusions about housing units removed" she added.
But Wachsmuth stood firm with his report and said: "My methodology is completely transparent."
"We shouldn’t let short-term rentals drive out long-term rentals, " the author of the research added.
(Reporting by Souvik Ghosh)
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