Weekly Data Story
How did the pandemic impact New York City’s Airbnb listings?
For this analysis, we obtained our raw data from Kaggle and Inside Airbnb (great data). We crosschecked our sources with information from articles, data science blogs and other research sites to make sure that the data was reliable. Strangely, we could not obtain a dataset for the year 2020 from any reliable source. If this dataset is spotted in the wild, it would be greatly appreciated if it is sent to us. Anyway, we selected the years, 2019 and 2021, to do a comparative analysis.
The pandemic had a severe impact on New York City’s Airbnb listings. For 2019 Airbnb’s listings were 48,896 while for 2021 they were 36,924, this represents a 24.4 % decrease in listings for the city. In those two years, the average Airbnb listing price from 2019 to 2021 went from $152 to $169, a 11.1 percent in increase. As for the spatial pattern differences, the reductions in listing can mostly be seen in from Midtown Manhattan (below Central Park) to Lower Manhattan (Broadway Street southern tip of Manhattan) at the two mile scale. In particular, the change can be seen in the upper west portion of Midtown and in the southeast area near Chinatown. If we examine the 2022 Airbnb numbers, there was only a modest increase in listing about 2000 which represents a 5 % increase.
Overall, the trend seems to correlate with the pattern that some major urban centers across the United States, specifically cities in the north, experienced with some depopulation. It is not surprising that this depopulation would correlate to lower Airbnb listings too. Urban centers in the south or southern states experienced an increase in population. We theorize that total Airbnb locations in southern urban centers probably increased. In subsequent posts, we will examine other cities.
Authors: Jose Pillich & Ryan Kmetz
