Monitoring and analysing Short-term let activities

The rise of the short-term lets market, sparked by the emergence of Airbnb, has supported the growth of tourism in many cities as well as other areas.

While this may generate income and employment opportunities for some, it can also bring a range of undesirable impacts: the noise and disruption of short-term visitors, and wider housing market and gentrification pressures, in particular. Studying the sector is difficult due to a lack of official statistics and the apparent reluctance of the main platforms to provide access to data.

The need for better monitoring is becoming ever more urgent as governments, including the Scottish Government start to try to regulate these activities, striking a new balance between the interests of landlords and residents.

Most research is based on a limited supply of open data (Inside Airbnb) or a commercial product (from AirDNA), but both have limitations. Data can be collected from platform websites but it is complex and it requires considerable work to derive useful statistics.

Our overall aim is to establish better methods for tracking activity in this sector, to provide robust analysis which can inform policy efforts. We develop open-source tools for scraping data (available here) and apply these to the one platform (Airbnb). We also developed new methods to produce useful metrics on stock levels, activity and incomes from these.

Aims and objectives

• Develop and maintain an open web scraping strategy to monitor short-term let activities in a number of UK cities
• Provide detailed methods and open code for replicating this scraping
• Develop new methods and metrics for measuring stock levels, activity and income through daily listings data
• Analyse changes in short-term rental markets and the relations with other sectors including long-term rental and tourism
• Evaluate the impact of regulation of the short-term lets market
• Work closely with national, devolved and local stakeholders to explore the value of the data and methods for policymaking

Latest outputs

Blog by Yang Wang: https://www.ubdc.ac.uk/news/how-has-licensing-affected-short-term-lets-in-scotland

Dataset: https://data.ubdc.ac.uk/datasets/short-term-let-airbnb-supply-and-performance-small-area-summaries

Wang, Y., Livingston, M., McArthur, D., and Bailey, N. (2023) The challenges of measuring the short-term rental market: an analysis of open data on Airbnb activity, Housing Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2023.2176829
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Wang, Y., Livingston, M., McArthur, D., and Bailey, N. (2024) Enhancing our Understanding of Short-term Rental Activity: A Daily Scrape-based Approach for Airbnb Listings, PlosOne 19 (2): e0298131. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298131

Researchers

Nick Bailey, Dr Yang Wang‍