75%+ of short-term Airbnb rentals disappeared in NYC
... And they haven’t come back.
Anyone who lives in NYC will tell you how hard it is to find a good place to rent… but now, even those trying to hire out a spare room in the city are struggling.
Last September, New York City enforced a long-debated and much-contested policy, known as Local Law 18, which placed regulations on unlicensed short-term rentals listed on platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. These included banning all stays for periods shorter than 30 days if the host is unregistered, as well as requiring short-term hosts to be physically present for the duration of their guests’ stays and limiting the number of paying guests in any property to 2.
A wave of applications to become a registered host soon followed; however, of the 6,395 short-term rental applications that the Office of Special Enforcement received from March ‘23 to June ‘24, only a third have been approved. As a result, the number of short-term rentals on Airbnb in NYC plummeted sharply, per data from Inside Airbnb, while long-term rentals shot up 50%.
Today, the situation remains unchanged: as of July, there were only 5,044 short-term rentals on Airbnb in the city, and a massive 32,721 long-term rentals — 93% of which have a minimum-night stay at exactly the 30-day long-term threshold.
Regulatory scrutiny in globally iconic tourist hotspots like New York and Barcelona is an ongoing thorn in Airbnb’s side at a time when customer demand is waning, with the San Francisco-based company recently reporting profits in Q2 that were down 15% on the same quarter last year.
