Airbnb competition leads to some saturated rental markets

Yahoo Finance Live anchors Rachelle Akuffo and Ines Ferre discuss Airbnb and how the vacation rental hosts are facing competition.

Video transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Airbnb listings for the third quarter jumped 17% year over year and as demand for short-term renting continues to grow.

Joining us now for a breakdown on that is Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre. Hey, Ines.

INES FERRE: Hey, Rachelle. And there's been a lot of talk about what a recession will do to the short-term rental market. We recently saw online some backlash against the short-term rental market, complaints. Also some hosts wondering why their occupancies have fallen recently. Well, Airbnb had done some algorithm changes.

But if you look at the data, this may have to do with supply. 54% of the global online listings on Airbnb were added since 2020. That's according to AirDNA. That's a data-analytics firm.

So this coincides with the era of low mortgage rates last year, folks scooping up properties, listing them as short-term rentals. And I spoke to one property-management company. They said that this is now a normalization of the short-term rental market. In some saturated areas, some short-term-rental hosts may have to pivot to mid-term rentals. That's what they're seeing now.

As far as supply is concerned, this may continue because, remember, a platform like Airbnb started during the recession when people were looking for extra income during the last recession, 2008. So Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, recently was on Yahoo Finance and said, look, there may be more supply coming because, during a recession, folks will want to make more income. So you may even see more supply of listings going forward.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: We'll be keeping an eye on that. A big thank you to Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre.