* sourcE: "sHaring is tHE nEW buying," vision critical, 2014 august 2015 BCBusiness 29
occupancy ever and that their studies show
that people staying at Airbnbs are people who
never would have stayed as long—or even trav-
elled to a city—without that option. "The pie is
just growing."
That's not completely smoke and mirrors.
At least one academic study suggests that Uber-
type services, for example, help "thicken" what
is traditionally a thin market. People often don't
take taxis because they seem hard to get and
unreliable—but once it feels as though getting
a ride is easy (that there's a "thick supply"),
they'll become more likely to use all taxi-type
services more regularly, says the paper from
UBC researchers Simon Harding and others.
And, after all, that's the argument used for tran-
sit: demonstrate to the public that the service is
fast and frequent and they'll pile in.
On the other hand, other independent
research shows that Airbnb, for one, is having
an impact. A recent Texas study concluded that
hotel revenues declined by about half a per cent
for each 10 per cent increase in Airbnb supply.
In Austin, the city where Airbnb is the most
popular, that meant a 13 per cent revenue loss
overall—with lower-cost hotels, the ones cater-
ing to tourists, the most a"ected. It's the same
story when it comes to another Airbnb impact
that people worry about, which is the way it
sucks up relatively low-cost housing space that
becomes unavailable to local renters. Again,
Zi¤in says that Airbnb is "too small to have an
impact"—which might be true in some cities,
but where there's a high demand for both tour-
ist and resident space, maybe not. The New York
City attorney general issued a report in 2014
concluding that, with 4,600 units in the city
being rented out almost exclusively as Airbnb
rentals year-round, the city was losing housing
units that would otherwise have gone to long-
term residents. As for Uber,
UBC transporta-
tion consultant Joe Sulmona argued in a recent
OF SHARERS
ASSOCIATE
LOANER
VEHICLES WITH
SUSTAINABILITY.
ONLY 28%
ASSOCIATE
RETAIL STORES
WITH
SUSTAINABILITY *
46%
OF SHARERS
ASSOCIATE
SHARING PLACES
TO STAY WITH
COMMUNITY.
ONLY 25%
ASSOCIATE
RETAIL STORES
WITH
COMMUNITY *
41%
OF SHARERS
ASSOCIATE
LOANER
PRODUCTS WITH
HELPING OTHERS.
ONLY 12%
ASSOCIATE
RETAIL STORES
WITH HELPING
OTHERS *
48%
OUR HOME IS YOUR HOME
Vancouverites Sylvain Senez and
Alexis Fletcher rent out rooms
in their Commercial Drive
bungalow through Airbnb
