Airbnb Listings Revenues Falling Fastest in These Nine Cities, Data Reveals

Airbnb, the popular service that lets property owners rent their spaces to travelers, has seen its revenues per listing drop across the country in the past year.

Data from short-term rental analytics company AllTheRooms shows that Airbnb's revenues per listing have dropped by nearly 50 percent in some cities, leading real-estate consultant Nick Gerli of Reventure Consulting to issue a warning about a house price crash. Numbers from other companies show a more modest decline.

Airbnb suffered enormously during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated decline in bookings in 2020 of 72 percent compared to the previous year. To get through the crisis, the company laid off 25 percent of its workforce and raised $2 billion in combined equity and debt to shore up its balance sheet.

The drop in revenues per listing for the company is, on average, 3.6 percent per market, according to data from AirDNA, a company that tracks performance and monitors trends in short-term rentals, economist Jamie Lane, AirDNA's senior vice president, tweeted on Wednesday. The data analyzed by AirDNA refers to change in revenue per available listing from May 2022 to May 2023.

These are the nine cities where Airbnb's revenues per listing have seen the steepest declines, according to AirDNA data:

• New Orleans, Louisiana (-14.9 percent)
• Orlando, Florida (-10.5 percent)
• Sevierville, Tennessee (-9.4 percent)
• Austin, Texas (-7.2 percent)
• Panama City, Florida (-6.9 percent)
• Lakeland, Florida (-6.3 percent)
• Seattle, Washington (-6.0 percent)
• San Antonio, Texas (-3.9 percent)
• Phoenix, Arizona (-3.0 percent).

The drop in revenues per listing calculated by AirDNA is much more modest than the one estimated by Gerli. Sevierville, in eastern Tennessee, saw a decline of under 10 percent, according to Lane, compared to Gerli's estimated 47.6 percent fall.

In a few other cities included in AirDNA's list, revenues per listing have been growing, with Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, seeing an increase of 5.5 percent; Salisbury, Maryland, 11.5 percent; Breckenridge, Colorado, 3.5 percent; and Denver, Colorado, 0.4 percent.

Airbnb managed to stay afloat through the COVID-19 pandemic, but new challenges have emerged, including a drop in demand for short-term rentals in the U.S. over the increased cost of living and less desire to work from home in states like Montana, Texas and Tennessee, according to Gerli.

He and other economists agree that a problem with Airbnb is that many listed properties are staying empty, after the number of listed properties available in the U.S. reached a total of 1.38 million in September 2022—a 23.2 percent surge year-over-year, according to AirDNA as reported by Time.

Lane told Newsweek that AirDNA expects "modest declines throughout the rest of the year" for Airbnb revenues, "down around 1 percent for RePAR [Revenue Per Available Room] and then no growth in 2024" in addition to "occupancies coming down slightly offsetting a small increase in average daily rates [ADRs].

"With the number of listings increasing by 14 percent in 2023 and revenue per available listings down just 1.1 percent, we still see overall revenue earned by short-term rental hosts and property managers increasing by 13 percent in the U.S. in 2023," Lane added.

In a statement to Newsweek about the data on revenues per listing, Airbnb said: "The data is not consistent with our own data. As we said during our Q1 earnings, more guests are traveling on Airbnb than ever before, with Nights and Experiences Booked growing 19 percent in Q1 2023 compared to a year ago."

Update, 6/29/23, 10:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Jamie Lane.

Update, 6/29/23, 12:20 p.m. ET: This article was updated with a statement from Airbnb, and to amend "revenues" to "revenues per listing."