Location, location, and professionalization: Paper published in Regional Studies, Regional Science

Along with Robbin Deboosere and Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy of the Transportation Research at McGill group (TRAM), we’re excited to announce the open access publication of Location, location, and professionalization: A multilevel hedonic analysis of Airbnb listing prices and revenue. Using hedonic modeling techniques we investigated what factors influence price per night and montlhy revenue of Airbnb listings. We found:

• Locational factors–above all, transit accessibility to jobs–and neighbourhood variation have a large impact on both price per night and monthly revenue
• Professionalization of the short-term rental market is driving more revenue to a narrower segment of hosts

Together these findings suggest that Airbnb hosts earn a significant premium by converting long-term housing in transit-accessible residential neighbourhoods. In turn, this incentivizes hosts to replace existing long-term residents with short-term guests, forcing those in search of housing to less accessible neighbourhoods.

Another UPGo paper, Airbnb and the rent gap, shows how these incentives are linked to the gentrification of New York City.