Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by margalabargala on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:28PM
(#30727766)
On some level, this is hotels failing to compete. If I look up both airbnbs and hotels in a popular vacation town (randomly using Big Sky, MT, april 18-20, for this example) then I see hotels and airbnbs in similar locations, and at similar price points. However, there are airbnbs cheaper than the cheapest hotels, and they have a number of amenities that no hotels offer- notably, a washer/dryer in-unit, a full kitchen, and multiple actual rooms.
Given the same nightly price, who would choose a minimal pared-down hotel room over an entire furnished condominium?
In vacation towns, the issue is that tourists are flooding out of hotels, and into livable dwellings.
Our hotel vacancy rates are rising just as fast as our home prices.
Perhaps the solution is tearing down hotels and building high-rise apartments in their stead, but it seems a bit wasteful compared to the alternative (regulating and taxing Airbnbs to nudge tourists back into the hotels designed for them).