Airbnb's success story stands out in stark contrast to the struggles of other startups. Unlike Zillow's disastrous attempt at house-flipping, Airbnb has flourished for over a decade. Their revenue skyrocketed, tripling from $3.3 billion to nearly $10 billion. Even more impressive, they flipped profitability, going from annual losses of $4-5 billion to earning the same staggering amount. Perhaps the strongest indicator of their dominance is their resilient stock price. Unlike the post-IPO crashes
  • @cyd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42•5 months ago

    US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

    • @Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3•5 months ago

      Air BnB effectively pitted average renters and homeowners against the luxury hotel market. From a supply/demand standpoint its basically moving something like 10% of the rental market to the hotel market.

      What this does is it means luxury long term rentals slot out the next lower tier of housing at higher pricing it slides down the economic ladder until a percent of people at the bottom is simply outbid for the reduced normal rental housing stock.

      Its not airbnb’s fault the market shifted but it is a problem with the market as a result of blending the luxury hotel market with residential housing.