It is easy to forget that Airbnb is only just over 10 years old, when looking at the extensive ecosystem that has sprouted up around it. Already existing sectors like traditional vacation rentals and serviced apartments have gravitated towards the major platform, while new property managers and business-to-business vendors have launched in recent years.
It is then, hard to overstate the impact that the short-term rental sector has had on the travel industry. Hotels are lobbying for stricter regulations while at the same time entering the sector through acquisitions or new brand launches. And the sector’s impact goes beyond hotels, with realtors and property investors increasingly looking at short-term rentals as a lucrative alternative to their regular practices. Meanwhile, regulators are scratching their heads about the best way to legislate all these developments.
Preliminary findings from the upcoming 2017 NMHC/Kingsley Associates Apartment Renter Preferences Survey, which will be released at the end of October, showed that the majority of apartment renters under 54 say that short-term rentals in their apartment communities would either have a positive or no impact on their opinion. Moreover, the younger the renter, the more accepting of short-term rentals, with a whopping 81 percent of renters under 25 saying they were open—or at least ambivalent—to them.
The fact that short-term rentals don’t seem to be going anywhere represents a strategic business opportunity for some.
Corporate Housing & furnished apartments providers in Houston saying that its never been different, background checks and insurance has always been a part of booking process applied on their guests, the confusion/problem is with private individuals who are subletting their apartments without consent from the communities or private individuals that are representing themselves as corporate companies and by that damaging and hurting the short term rentals industry.
For Jason Fudin, CEO of WhyHotel, which provides a pop-up hotel solution to help apartment firms accelerate lease-ups of new communities while generating additional revenue, the resistance and even skepticism about the viability of the short-term rental industry is to be somewhat expected. However, it is the next iteration of a development trend that’s been in play for decades, he argued. Furnished apartments are here to stay and while landlords needs to differ the professionally managed furnished apartments companies from individuals who sublease their units, the furnished apartments companies needs to differ themselves from the nationwide providers and the locale if they want to upper hand them service wise.
