Statistical Overview of Barcelona’s Airbnb Market
This article follows an exploratory data analysis of Barcelona’s Airbnb economy. Airbnb is extremely popular in Barcelona and works parallel to the big hotel industry. Forbes mentions Barcelona is now the third-biggest city for Airbnb rentals in Europe behind Paris and London and the sixth-biggest in the world. Barcelona’s Airbnb activity has also been the subject of political and legal actions carried against the hosts using the platform. The city is acting to remove thousands of properties from the platform which didn’t have a tourist license and were shut down. According to available data, Airbnb usage in Barcelona is only increasing every year with more hosts setting up listings on the platform.
Airbnb Data Source
Airbnb doesn’t share raw data, however some of the data is available using Inside Airbnb which makes Airbnb data accessible by using publicly available information from the Airbnb site. The data is a snapshot of searchable listings from 07 February, 2018. The data includes:
- Dates and prices of future available dates
- Reviews of searchable listings
- Locations and listings metadata
Exploratory Data Analysis
We can expect that in a city with such high demand most hosts will be “professional hosts” that rent full apartments or private rooms and hold multiple listings that will maximize their net profit, however the data tells us differently. We can see that ~70% of active listings hosts hold a single listing. This can be a result of both the city hall actions to close non licensed listings and also the “One Host, One Home” policy set by Airbnb itself to limit 1 listing per host for non tourism licensed listings in the city center.
*Listing is considered active if it has between 1 to 364 available dates in the upcoming year and also received at least 1 review in the last 8 months.
Assuming most listings are non professional we could expect that the most popular listing type would be private and shared rooms, allowing the host to continue living in his own home. In reality private rooms distribute evenly with entire apartments. This suggests two scenarios — hosts live in their day to day apartment and list another full apartment which is a year long Airbnb listing or the income from entire apartment is high enough to encourage hosts to move out for the night.
Seasonal Demand
We can estimate bookings by looking at number of given reviews. Inside Airbnb has already estimated review rate is roughly 50%, this review rate also aligns in the following graphs when comparing to stats found in Airbnb official papers.
The review shows a trend of year by year growth of 40% from 2016 to 2017 in number of reviewed listings.
The demand has also a monthly seasonality reaching a peak in demand on August and another shorter peak on new years. We can see how the prices of available listings are correlated and adapt to the holiday demand.
Seeing these data can explain the willingness of hosts to share or even move out of the apartment. Average rent for a one bedroom in city center can be a monthly 800€ which is daily rent of 32$. The same apartment can be listed on Airbnb on August for 140$, even after platform and cleaning fees this is a very good saving for the apartment renter. Comparing the average listing price during August of 140$ against an average daily Barcelona hotel room price of 212$ can show how both hosts and guests find Airbnb a good deal.
Professional Hosting
How many professional Airbnb listings are operating in Barcelona is one of the main debatable questions in between Airbnb activity and the city. The full time host will try to maximize the time the listing is occupied by guests and minimize the time between visiting parties.
It is possible to use review dates in order to estimate the average time between bookings. The following graph tells us that a listing which was reviewed only 10 times and can be considered a casual — non professional listing has 10 days between bookings (based on 50% review rate).
Based on Airbnb paper the Average length of stay per guest is 4.3 nights. This measure was added as the orange dotted line. In order to keep the listing working every night the listing needs to receive at least ~90 bookings.
Airbnb considers a listing as a professional listing if it is booked more than 120 days per year. We will use the same threshold for this part of the analysis.
Plotting the distribution of listings by estimated bookings shows that~32% of listings which are 4,320 listings can be considered professional based on 120 days criteria.
When comparing those 4,320 Airbnb professional listings to the 75,000 beds in the city’s hotels, we may conclude that these listings represent only 5% of Barcelona’s tourist dedicated accommodations.
Listings Neighborhood Distribution
Barcelona’s population of 1.6M live in the city’s in 10 neighborhoods. The city is experiencing over tourism of 32M yearly visitors, about half of them are day-trippers. Let us look at how Airbnb is affecting the city on the neighborhood level. For this part we used Tableau 10.2 GeoJSON import functionality.
The city center neighborhoods of Ciutat Vella and Eixample are the most active Airbnb neighborhoods and actually when looking at specific areas
reta de l’Eixample, Raval and Barri Gòtic hold 27% of the entire city Airbnb activity.
Are the city center hosts the only ones to enjoy the popularity of Airbnb in Barcelona? Seems not. We can notice both listings and reviews are spread across the different parts of the city, when~30% of listings and reviews happen outside the three centered neighborhoods.
Is Airbnb taking up residential space in specific neighborhoods?
The right way to answer this question is to calculate the percent of households used by Airbnb in each neighborhood and specifically professional listings. We will estimate the number households by using population by district data and assume a measure of 2 people per apartment.
The Ciutat Vella neighborhood is the most influenced neighborhood in Barcelona, however, only 1.9% of apartments are actually professional listings and the rest 3.3% of apartments are casual Airbnb listings. Airbnb is pushing more tourists into the already crowded city center but probably less of what is considered on the expense of local residential apartments.
Conclusion
Airbnb operates in a dynamic marketplace affected by politics, regulations, seasonality, culture and economics. Barcelona, being a beautiful place to visit, has made Airbnb a popular way to make some income, on a professional basis in specific areas but also across all neighborhoods. Most hosts use Airbnb in a casual way usually with a single listing and ~30% will manage multiple listings. As long as Airbnb delivers a friendly budget option compared to hotels and a meaningful income for hosts, we will probably continue to see the marketplace growing with pressure from authorities to regulate the hosts.
