The Rise and Utility of Long-term Airbnbs
I live in an Airbnb with my cousin, and we’ve moved every month to a new location. Moving this often forces you to be a natural minimalist, so each of us own no more than we can squeeze into one large suitcase. It took us about 4 hours to pack, move, unpack, and reorganize our new space to our liking today. It took us 3 hours last time.
This is already my 4th long-term Airbnb since moving to New York 3 months ago. Each of the previous stays was about a month long, and this one will a month as well. I’ve encountered many other people living this lifestyle in the city. Airbnb is mostly known for its short-term accomodations, but long-terms stays have become an increasing part of their business.
There are professionally managed homes now that exist for the sole purpose of renting out their rooms on Airbnb. Whatever tax and zoning loopholes they’re exploiting to operate these businesses are sure to become a source of scrutiny for local governments.
I’ve stayed for over a month at at time in these professionally managed homes in LA and New York so far, and their low vacancy rates imply that there’s a market gap being filled by these homes. Generally, your options for housing in America have been two-fold: sign a lease, usually for a minimum of 6 months, or rent a hotel room day-by-day for short term stays.
What’s been missing is a good option for stays ranging from 2 weeks to 6 months. At this duration, hotel stays become too expensive, while apartment leases are too long.
As someone who has lived like this extensively, I can tell you that the process was a pain in the ass. Most apartments wouldn’t offer month-to-month leases. You could either sign a longer lease then sublease the portion of the lease you didn’t want or sublease somebody else’s lease for the days you desired. Finding subleases was generally done through Craigslist. Getting the exact dates you wanted was nearly impossible so you usually had to pay for days you didn’t want in order to get the days you did want. This was all assuming your apartment manager allowed subleasing in the first place, as I once found out when I received an eviction notice while 5000 miles away from home.
The low rate of subleasing might be taken as a sign that there isn’t a high demand for these sort of leases, but I’d argue that this was a supply issue, not a demand issue, caused by the hoops one had to jump through in order to find short-term housing.
Ever since Airbnb started offering longer stays, the process of finding a “month-to-month lease” has become much easier. There are a large amount of Airbnb hosts that require a minimum stay of 30 days and from what I’ve seen the demand for these type of stays is quite vibrant. New York City and Los Angeles both have large transient populations and I have rarely seen a room in these cities stay empty for more than a day or two at a time.
