The professionalisation of Airbnb in Paris: Who are the hosts who advertise more than 20 listings?

Abstract

The professionalisation of Airbnb in Paris: who are the hosts who advertise more than 20 listings?

This presentation aims to better understand the professionalization of Airbnb hosts in Paris, one of the cities with the most Airbnb listings along with London. While Airbnb’s narrative put much emphasis on being part of the so-called “sharing” or “peer-to-peer” economy, the flourishing literature in urban studies on the topic has shed light on the increasing professionalisation of this highly profitable sector (Gil et Sequera 2020; Cocola-Gant et Gago 2021; Demir et Emekli 2021). As one of the most attractive tourist destinations, Paris is no exception. The city has displayed around 55 000 listings since 2015 and can therefore be considered a mature market for short-term rentals. Indeed, from the mid-2010s, Airbnb gave rise to the emergence of a thriving economic ecosystem around short-term rentals in Paris, with the creation of myriads of companies whose business model relies on platform-mediated short-term rentals. Yet, very little is known about this ecosystem that is actually hiding behind the online platforms and which often occupies a grey reglementary area.

This paper aims to shed light on this economic ecosystem by uncovering who are the multi-listing hosts who advertise more than 20 listings and producing a typology of those companies. It presents the result of a research project carried out before COVID. It is based on an original material drawn from a mixed-method protocol that followed two main steps:

1.Based on Inside Airbnb data on Paris, a database of the hosts who advertise at least 20 listings with the same host ID was created. This has led to the identification of 71 hosts who advertise at least 20 listings. Then, all the online profiles of those hosts on the Airbnb platform were scraped to gather the online presentation of each host. The content of the presentation of each profile was analysed to get a first insight into who is hiding under these profiles and draw a first typology of multi-listing hosts (55/71 were identified).

2.A series of semi-structured interviews with nine of the identified multi-listing hosts was carried out in order to refine the typology of companies, and identify their business strategies and their adaptation strategies towards the regulation targeting short-term rentals in Paris.

The presentation shows that all the hosts advertising more than 20 listings are companies, but they are based on a variety of business models: concierge services (“conciergeries”) who manage listings on behalf of dozens of hosts, owners who manage their own portfolio, international companies specialised in short-term rentals and local start-ups. It also analyses the strategies developed by these multi-listing hosts regarding the regulation that was implemented in 2018 in Paris to mitigate the impacts of short-term rentals on housing availability in Paris.