446: Home Rentals

A Thousand Things to Talk About

Would you rent your home out on a service like AirBnB?

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Full episode script

Around the world, AirBNB, VRBO, Couchsurfing and the like all have millions upon millions of homes, bedrooms, treehouses, and even RVs listed for rental.

In Episode 344, we talked about the growth of services such as this and the impact they are having — or not having — on hotel occupancy.

What’s very interesting to me is some of the updated 2017 statistics on who does choose to rent out their home or a room in their home.

The fastest growing demographic of hosts on AirBNB, according to their 2017 press release about 4 million listings, is senior citizens. There are over 200,000 hosts over 60 years old on the service, and over 120,000 are senior women.

A number of cities are also starting to try and catch up with the explosion of home-sharing or room-sharing services, and especially large cities such as New Orleans, Seattle, and London. Rather than clamping down entirely, these cities are requiring things like registration, room taxes, and occupancy taxes be paid. A number are also starting to put in place requirements that hosts have no more than 1 or two listings on these services.

Then again, in Florida, AirBNB itself is opening up a “purpose-built” apartment building, essentially creating a hotel… at least in the more traditional sense. Even with this though, the bread and butter of home-sharing services is exactly that. Sharing. So would you do it? Why or why not?

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.