Debate on regulation and professionalisation in the short-term rental housing market

Abstract

Professionalisation in accommodation platforms is changing the short-term rental market worldwide. During the past decade, till today, Airbnb has been the leader in this economic sector, its spread has been a central issue in urban dynamics related to the several discomforts it has caused in cities. Recently, the professionalisation of its users has popped up as an additional issue to be dealt with. The professionalisation process has changed the internal structure of Airbnb from a peer-to-peer platform to a business-to-consumer one. Despite the growing attention to this trend, regulatory frameworks across cities still do not have policies to deal with this specific issue. This article proposes a data-driven methodology to identify the different economic approaches of professional hosts for contributing to the debate on professionalisation in short-term rental studies and provide new insights into the regulation debate. The proposed methodology consists of a cluster analysis applied to 2019 Airbnb data (from the AirDNA dataset) in eight Southern European cities: Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Seville, Rome, Naples, Athens and Thessaloniki. The results highlight four clusters that describe different economic approaches of Airbnb hosts recognisable in each city. The findings offer a novel and clear entry point to understand the professional hosts' economic strategies, which can inform policies to regulate their market, as well as advancing knowledge in the field of critical geographies of housing.