NEW YORK — The restrictions that New York City has applied since September to tourist accommodation platforms such as Airbnb have further increased the prices of hotels in the Big Apple and caused accommodation offers to migrate to less safe places such as Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, or customers moving to New Jersey.
The new regulations from the Mayor’s Office of New York force all hosts to register with local authorities, and also prohibit the rental of entire apartments for less than 30 days when the owners are not present.
As an Airbnb spokesperson told EFE, since two months ago “visitors to New York City now have fewer accommodation options in fewer neighborhoods, hotels have increased their nightly rates and, as expected, activity has slowed.” has gone underground with a large number of unregistered listings appearing on unregulated third-party websites.”
“The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: they are not welcome,” the director of global policies notes in an email to EFE. from Airbnb, Theo Yedinsky.
Airbnb has been extremely popular in the Empire State city for years, but between June and September, there were about 17,000 fewer short-term listings in the city, according to analytics firm AirDNA.
Additionally, short-term rental listings on this platform in New York City were down 77% in September compared to June, according to the same company.
Unsafe, further away or more expensive
Despite the rule, some hosts and potential guests bypass Airbnb and New York regulations by communicating directly with each other.
While other former Airbnb hosts are posting short-term stays on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, websites that cannot guarantee either party and where New York owners do not register with the city, which violates the law.
The Craigslist page has once made headlines for crimes committed in connection with its ads, such as that of a woman who advertised sexual services on Boston’s Craigslist and was murdered in 2009.
Airbnb also points out that after this measure, “people looking to stay in New York have fewer accommodation options and face higher hotel prices”, data supported by the Trivago Hotel Price Index, which shows that Hotel prices in New York City increased by 42% MoM and 6.61% YoY in September 2023.
While the New Jersey city – which is across the bank of the Hudson River – demand for short-term Airbnb rentals increased 83% in September from a year earlier, according to AirDNA.
Additionally, demand in the Hoboken neighborhood – one of the most popular in New Jersey – increased 33% in the same period.
The appeal of Airbnb
One of New York’s goals in changing this law is to make more housing available for New Yorkers and to lower rental prices.
John, who prefers not to give his last name, owns an apartment in Manhattan that he rents out monthly on Airbnb, while he lives in a rental apartment.
The man tells EFE that he prefers to rent his Upper West Side apartment for months than to rent it for a year in a traditional way, since he feels that the platform can protect him if there is any type of problem with the guest, he can recover the apartment easy if one day the rent goes up and you can rent it at a higher price.
Since he has always rented it monthly, he has not been directly affected by the change in New York rules, but indirectly, because there is now more monthly rental offer on the platform.
Although he has not yet used other applications, in November he paid $100 to be able to publish an ad for his apartment on Furnished Finder, a platform that only rents to nurses and mobile business professionals and does not charge any type of commission for being the mediator.
2023-11-16 04:40:56
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