Overview
Since its launch in 2008, Airbnb has skyrocketed in popularity as a travel accommodation alternative to traditional hotels. The company’s unique model, allowing travelers to rent anything from individual bedrooms to entire apartments/houses listed by local “hosts”, has since facilitated over 1 billion rentals across over 200 countries. The 5.6M worldwide Airbnb listings offer a sense of homeyness to travelers, plus the opportunity for hosts to profit off uninhabited parts of their property for anywhere from single nights to months at a time.
However, finding and booking an Airbnb rental can be an extensive and frustrating process within a dense urban area. In 2019, New York City boasted over 48,000 listings, from single beds in Brooklyn coliving spaces to full penthouse apartments and a daily yacht rental (for the reasonable price of $7,500 per day). Even after filtering to a particular date range, a customer may be overwhelmed by the myriad of listing choices presented for their stay. In this guide, we intend to analyze a dataset of 2019 Airbnb listings (data description below) and provide insights for both travelers and hosts on how to most effectively take advantage of Airbnb’s NYC offerings.
Data
The utilized dataset, from the “Inside Airbnb” site, contains information on all 2019 Airbnb listings with official addresses in New York City. The raw dataset can be found here on Kaggle.
Each observation row corresponds to a singular AirBnB listing (48,895 total) and the 16 variable columns are as follows:
- id: the ID number of the listing
- name: the name of the listing that can be found on airbnb.com
- host_id: the ID number of the host who posted the listing
- host_name: the name of the host who posted the listing
- neighbourhood_group: the NYC borough that the listing is in (Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, or Staten Island)
- neighbourhood: the neighborhood that the listing is in within the given borough
- latitude: the latitude coordinate of the listing
- longitude: the longitude coordinate of the listing
- room_type: the type of housing/room that the listing is (Private room, Entire home/apt, or Shared room)
- price: the dollars/night price of the listing
- minimum_nights: the minimum number of nights that guests can book the listing
- last_review: the date of the latest review of the listing
- reviews_per_month: the average number of reviews the listing gets per month
- calculated_host_listings_count: the total number of listings that the host has on AirBnB
- availability_365: the number of days per year that a listing is available
See a few example rows of the dataset below:
Subsetting and Visualizing The Data
Many of the 48,000 listings in the raw dataset have suspicious or outlier data values, such as listings with a $0 daily price, those requiring over a year as the minimum stay length, or those which were available for booking less than 7 days in 2019. To build a guide that is generally applicable to most users, we filtered this data down to listings that are generally reasonable and available for regular traveler booking. For the purpose of this analysis, we define “reasonable and available” listings as reaching the following criteria: * listings which were available for booking at least 3/4 of the year (or >= 274 days), * listings with a non-zero price that was no more than $500 a night, * and listings which can be rented out for less than 3 months (minimum nights <= 90)
The above criteria filters the raw data down to 9,234 listings. In the interactive map of these listings below, try zooming in to see regional trends in listings density. Particularly of note is the extremely high density of listings across Manhattan and in the northern portion of the Brooklyn borough. Zooming in, we can see that Manhattan listings are most concentrated just south of Central Park as well as at the southern tip of the borough, and that within each borough there is also local clustering of listings (likely in more desirable neighborhoods, or around neighborhood “downtowns” with commercial activity and transportation options).
Research Questions
Our research questions are divided to provide practical assistance to 3 different types of clients that interact with the Airbnb interface: a short-term traveler (for a week or less), a long-term traveler (for 1-3 months), and listing hosts.
- For the short-term tourist, we wonder: “Which NYC borough and neighborhood provides the best options for a stay that’s shorter than a week long?”
- Similarly, for a business traveler we wonder: “Which NYC borough and neighborhood is the best for a long-term stay, for 1-3 months?”
- Finally, for hosts we ask: “How do hosts best market themselves at different price points?”
Research Question 1: “Which NYC borough provides the best options for a stay that’s shorter than a week long?”
Most visitors to New York City are tourists, likely planning to stay for a week or less. These travelers might wonder which borough has the most Airbnb options, what neighborhoods in that borough should be checked for listings first, and how pricing compares between boroughs and different types of rooms for short stays.
Based on the overlaid density plot showing the mapped distribution of Airbnb listings with a minimum of <= 7 below, short term listings are most dense in lower Manhattan and northern Brooklyn. For this reason, we limit our analysis to these two boroughs, as they are the most likely to have available listings for travelers planning to stay in NYC for a week or less.
Next, we figure out which neighborhoods within Manhattan and Brooklyn have the most listings, and how listing price breaks down between these options. The below faceted bar graph shows the the 5 neighborhoods within each borough with the most short-term listings (referred to as the “most common neighborhoods” on the graph), colored by price quartile. Among short-term rentals, price quartiles are defined as follows:
- First quartile: 0 < price <= $65
- Second quartile: 65 < price <= $100
- Third quartile: 100 < price <= $180
- Fourth quartile: 180 < price
This bar graph reveals two main insights about the data. First, Brooklyn Neighbourhoods tend to generally have more listings (as they have taller bars overall). Second, Manhattan listings in the most common neighborhoods skew to higher prices than Brooklyn listings. This can be seen by looking at the size of the dark grey bar segments which indicates listings in the fourth quartile of price (or top 25%); in Manhattan, most listings are in this top quartile (especially in the Financial District and Midtown neighborhoods) while in Brooklyn there are very few listings in the fourth quartile (especially in the East Flatbush and Bushwick neighborhoods). With these takeaways in mind, we suggest focusing on Brooklyn neighborhoods for the average traveler rather than Manhattan, since most travelers would prefer to spend less money when possible.
Within these Brooklyn neighborhoods, another factor that we can analyze is how room type interacts with pricing. For this, we look specifically at the 3 Brooklyn neighborhoods with the most short-term Airbnb listings: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, and Bushwick. The density plot below compares price curves for private room and entire home/apartment listings types between the three neighborhoods (the number of shared room accommodations was negligible and therefore excluded).
As expected, this graph shows that private room accommodations are less expensive than full home/apartments, and that full home/apartments have a larger spread of prices as quality and size can likely vary more. For each listing type, Williamsburg prices are most common at higher values and are more spread out across the price scale compared to Bedford-Stuyvesant or Bushwick. Referring back to the above stacked bar plot, we recall that the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood had almost twice as many listings as Bushwick, so it’s more likely for a traveler to find a reasonably-priced and available Airbnb there. Therefore, we recommend that an NYC tourist begins searching for a short-term stay in a private room or whole home/apartment within the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough.
Research Question 2: “Which NYC borough is the best for a long-term stay, for 1-3 months?”
Another common type of guest to New York City is likely longer-term business travelers, who would need to rent out an Airbnb listing for 1-3 months. This type of visitor requires a full home/apartment-style listing so they have amenities like a kitchen for cooking and more space to live and relax in.
The below map shows the distribution of Airbnb listings around the city with minimum nights between 30 and 90 days. We limit the minimum nights in this way because we want to look at listings specifically meant for long-term stays based on their longer minimum night requirement, as they’re likely to have the necessary amenities catered towards a long-term guest.
On the above map, we see that the large majority of long-term Airbnbs are in Manhattan, with a few dotted in northern Brooklyn and randomly around the other boroughs. With this in mind, we dive deeper into Manhattan listings to find which specific neighborhoods within Manhattan have the most listings at different price points.
For this purpose, we create another stacked box plot for the 5 most common Manhattan neighborhoods, in terms of long-term rental options. The color of the bars corresponds to price quartiles for long-term Airbnbs, which are defined as:
- First quartile: 0 < price <= $138.2
- Second quartile: 138.2 < price <= $200
- Third quartile: 200 < price <= 249
- Fourth quartile: 249 < price
In the above graph, we see that the Upper East Side, Midtown, and Hell’s Kitchen all have the most long-term stay listings. Between these three neighborhoods, the Upper East side has the highest proportion of listings in the first and second price quartiles, while midtown has the highest proportion of listings in the third and fourth quartiles. Thus for someone who wants to keep price in mind during their long-term stay, the Upper East Side is probably their best option to find a lower priced Airbnb. Meanwhile, Midtown could be good for a traveler who doesn’t mind paying extra to have a nice Airbnb during their stay.
Research Question 3: “How do hosts best market themselves at different price points?”
Finally, we also wanted to explore how hosts market their properties to customers at different price points through word choice in the listing name, which is the very first impression that a customer gets scrolling through an Airbnb search. We compare “cheap” listings in the first price quartile among all NYC airbnbs (defined as price <= 65) and “expensive” listings in the fourth quartile among all listings (defined as price >= 196). Below, we create a comparison word cloud for the individual words used in listing titles for these two groups of listings.
Analyzing the above word cloud, we generate the following insights: Hosts posting cheap listings focus more on locations and neighborhoods; for example, they mention the (East/West) Village, Harlem, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn (bklyn). They describe the listings using terms such as comfort and charming, and for artists. On the other hand, the hosts of expensive listings describe the listings as spacious and modern. They mention the upper east side (ues), the beach, and guesthouses. These listings seem marketed more through their closeness to particular amenities through words such as near, close, and medical. The more expensive listing titles focus on how luxurious the airbnbs are, while the cheaper listing titles focus on neighborhood location and budget-friendly features of the listing. Thus hosts wanting to list a new property at a particularly low or high price point can consult these common wordings that suggest price point and quality of listing.
Main Takeaways
The main takeaways from our 3 research questions are:
- Someone looking to visit New York City for a week or less should look for applicable listings in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for a high density of options at low price points for both full home/apartment and private room listings. Secondary options for this client group would be the Bushwick and Williamsburg neighborhoods, also in Brooklyn.
- A long-term business traveler to the city needing a full home/apartment should search for listings in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood for lower-price options, or Midtown for nicer and more expensive listings.
- Finally, hosts listing a new apartment at a low price point should aim to utilize listing title language related to location and mentions of budget-friendliness, while new listings at a high price point should utilize language related to nearby amenities and spacious modern aspects of the accommodations.
These insights can offer benefits for both of the main stakeholders in the Airbnb system: hosts and travelers. Improving their experiences with the company through more efficient booking encourages repeat customers, boosting Airbnb’s profits and increasing the number of fulfilling travel experiences offered annually to millions of guests.