[URBAN NOTE] "Airbnb’s Toronto data is a confusing mess"

[rfmcdonald]

At MacLean's, Colin Horgan finds issue with the statistics provided by Airbnb.

On the surface, Airbnb’s new figures work to downplay the perception that its rentals are swallowing housing stock. The company points out that “out of 5.3 million total housing units in Ontario as of the year 2011, only 500 homes are listed for 270 days or more per year with Airbnb.” And in keeping with its recent marketing push (featuring billboards prominently displayed in downtown Toronto and, now, host testimonial ads in Vancouver), Airbnb states that Ontario hosts “earn modest, but significant, amounts of supplemental income from hosting,” and are “everyday people trying to pay the bills.” Additionally, the report states that “the vast majority of Airbnb’s Ontario hosts share their primary residence.”

Unsurprisingly, the majority of Airbnb’s 15,000 Ontario hosts are in Toronto; the city is home to 8,600 of them. Like Vancouver, Toronto is going through a stiff real estate squeeze, with average house prices hitting a new high in August. Airbnb explains its impact on housing, by stating that “almost 90 per cent of hosts have just one entire home listing,” and that 39 per cent of listings are “operated by hosts renting between one and 30 nights per year.”

However, other figures hint that there are potentially many listings in Toronto operated by a small number of people, but it’s difficult to ascertain what that number may be. For all its talk of transparency, Airbnb’s data report does not make that—or much else—easy to figure it out.

For instance, the report states that two per cent of Airbnb’s 8,600 Toronto hosts—just 172 hosts—had five or more whole home listings, which accounted for 13 per cent of all listings in the city in June 2016. But Airbnb doesn’t make it easy to contextualize that latter figure, because the report doesn’t list the total number of whole home listings available in the city during the same period—it just gives the percentage.

Maclean’s asked Airbnb to provide the total number of listings for June. The company did not. Instead, Alex Dagg, policy lead for Airbnb in Canada provided a statement that the numbers in the report, “in our opinion represent a transparent view of the current market, which is constantly changing.”