Airbnb, in an apparent attempt to make nice with Governor Cuomo while he contemplates signing a bill that will pretty much kill their business in this city, announced this week that they've spent the last year removing 2,233 listings from their platform over concerns they might be illegal hotel operators.
The embattled home-sharing website announced the removals, on Thursday, noting in a statement that the removed listings were put up by hosts "with multiple listings that could impact long-term housing availability," and not by hosts who were only renting out their primary residences. The removals have happened gradually from late November 2015 to June 2016
The city has been hard at work cracking down on illegal hotels, claiming that a significant chunk of Airbnb users advertise multiple dwellings on the site, with a report last year finding that from 2010 to 2014, 37 percent of revenue generated by Airbnb hosts came from hosts with three or more listings.
Airbnb critics argue that hosts who rent out entire apartments on the website are taking much-needed housing off the rental market—a recent report found that these hosts took about 10 percent of the city's available rentals off of the market in 2015. A law passed in the state legislature last month will make it illegal to advertise entire apartments on Airbnb, as opposed to renting out one room while the host is present. Cuomo is expected to make a decision on whether to sign the law by the end of the year.
A spokesperson with Airbnb told us that while the website is working to get rid of listings they suspect are illegal hotels, they do want New York to allow hosts to rent out the entirety of their primary residences for short periods of time, rather than requiring a host to be present during the Airbnb stay. These listings, the company notes, do not remove rental units from the market, and according to their data, about 96 percent of Airbnb hosts who share an entire home only put up one listing.
Airbnb says that the 2,223 listings recently removed make up about 5 percent of the total listings in the city, and 1,585 of them were in Manhattan, with a large concentration in Midtown.
