Airbnbs Outnumber New York City Apartments in Hot Market

Prospective renters wait outside to enter an apartment unit during an open house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022. Long lines in the cold, fierce competition and bidding wars. This has become the reality for New Yorkers who are flooding the rental market in search of apartments, an increasingly scarce commodity less than two years after a pandemic-related exodus had some predicting the demise of the city. (Bloomberg)

The number of short-term rentals in New York City is outpacing the number of available apartments, putting a pinch on renters who are looking for space in a hot housing market. 

The total number of short-term rentals of entire homes in the city’s five boroughs -- those listed on Airbnb Inc. and Expedia Group Inc.’s Vrbo -- is more than 13,000, according to third-party data tracker AirDNA. Meanwhile, rental inventory in Manhattan, Brooklyn and a portion of Queens hovers just over 7,500, according to an April report from broker Douglas Elliman Real Estate. AirDNA defines active listings as those with one reserved or available day in the last month. 

Manhattan’s housing market is getting hotter by the month, with the median rent in April surging to $3,870 for new leases signed last month. There were 4,709 apartments to rent last month, down from 20,743 a year earlier, meaning landlords have the upper hand in negotiating with tenants looking for housing in the borough. The vacancy rate in Manhattan sat at just over 1.5% last month, the second-lowest level on record, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. 

Critics say that Airbnb’s business model makes homes unaffordable in large cities that are attractive for tourists. Airbnb specializes in urban markets, while its competitor Vrbo focuses more on whole vacation homes. New York has tightened some restrictions on short-term rentals, requiring platforms like Airbnb to share hosting and listing data with the city if they want to rent out their home for fewer than 30 days. New York also requires that a host be present in the home if it’s rented out for fewer than 30 days. 

Airbnb said the reality is different than the numbers suggest.

“As presented, the data provides an unfairly narrow look at rental unit availability in a portion of the city versus scraped short-term rental data for the entire city,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company’s listing supply has decreased in the last two years. Most of Airbnb’s listings are concentrated in Manhattan. The number of entire home rentals peaked at 20,300 in 2019, according to AirDNA.

New York real estate publication Curbed reported the data earlier. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.