91–100 of 471 posts
77% of nights booked were for entire homes ( not spare rooms ). I would have guessed this to be much higher, like 95+ or something. That’s interesting and I guess the big thing that makes this different than vrbo if they can grow the spare room side much more over time
I switched from hosting with Airbnb over to a property management company when I'm out of town. Airbnb continues to refuse to take security seriously and won't fulfill their host guarantee in the event that a guest causes thousands of dollars in damages. They should be an easy company to beat for long term rentals since they're so poorly run in many ways. I don't think they have any serious competition for very short…
Are they even interested in the long term rental space?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pg is surprisingly prescient in his predictions about the potential size of the opportunity. This might just be survivorship bias though, but still, one takeaway I got from the email exchanges is that pg really evaluated founders on both the idea/market opportunity and the qualities of the founders themselves: I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before. We had big doubts about this idea, but…
It's interesting that they both missed the real killer edge here. Fred said it was Etsy, Paul said it would move up into hotels. Neither are really what happened. Turns out in most places it's profitable to arbitrage long term property cost and AirBnB income. So you have a bunch of small time operators buying or leasing property and putting them on AirBnB. AFAICT that seems to be the bulk of AirBnB business. Not Etsy…
Down $600m in 2019 and another $600m in 2020? With $2b in debt? Ouch. I'm reading this right, correct? I see the cash positions below are a bit different, but that's likely from... the loans? 2018 looked so hopeful. They only lose $20m total! 2019 should have been a profitable year, IMO, but they went with the aggressive strategy.
Revenue was up ~30%, but costs an expenses up ~50%, primarily SG&A and product development... basically they hired a lot of people it looks like.
Can anyone estimate what an investors in 2009 in Air BNB will get for an ROI post- IPO? I just looked and S&P 500 returned 426.134% with dividends reinvested through September 2020.
The real question is though, going forward, what ROI will Airbnb deliver vs. the S&P 500.
Growth stocks seem to be nearing bubble territory at the moment, so if we get a repeat of the 2000s where interest rates start rising again and value stocks become more in favor, it doesn't look great.
Then again, selling fractionalized access to highly restricted real estate supply in all of the world's major cities doesn't sound like a bad bet for the future. If the lack of desire to invest in new construction in cities due to the covid narrative of cities being dead (obviously overblown) leads to further supply deficits, the future for Airbnb looks bright.
So in summation, its impossible to predict, buy index funds instead.
I heard a podcast discuss the possibility of AirBnB offering shares or options to superhosts (like me) ahead of the IPO–essentially as a "thank you" to the people who helped build the marketplace. Anyone have thoughts on if that is possible or plausible?
"At our request, the underwriters have reserved up to [blank] shares of Class A common stock, or [blank]% of the shares offered by this prospectus, for sale at the initial public offering price through a directed share program to: * Eligible U.S. hosts who hosted on our platform in 2019 and 2020 [...]"
Not sure what this means.
Excited to learn more about the specifics. Really hoping people don't flood this thread with their anecdotal bad Airbnb experiences ("I paid below market rate this one time 6 years ago and got a crappy host, therefore this company is going to fail!"), which seems to happen every-time someone mentions their name.
The experiences that people report often indicate systemic issues within the platform/product, especially when they are as pervasive as some on the AirBnB platform are.* I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them. * I've had two shit hosts that left me up a creek scrambling to find housing, as has my S/O. As a consumer, I am way less likely to use the platform now because my experience has shown me that AirBnB either doe…
It is so frustrating with all those recent tech startups how much they're spending on sales and marketing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1559720/000119312520... How does one figure whether the business will keep growing without blasting people's faces with ads? If so much spend on ads is required to generate revenue growth then there will either never be profits or the revenue growth will stall (and thus th…
Incidentally, half of those companies you've mentioned are in the top 50 spenders for marketing [1]. I'd hazard to say that they are all in the top 100 in global spend. [1] https://howmuch.net/articles/worlds-top-50-biggest-advertisi...
I am not saying advertising is bad, or that it doesn't work, or that you shouldn't do it. Nothing of this sort. It's just unclear to me what's the plan for eventually returning anything to the shareholder. All of the eventual value depends on this.
The seesaw in revenue over the last 3 quarters is insane: 841M, 334M, 1.3B in Q1, Q2, Q3. They even posted a profit last quarter. I've gotta say, the S1 looks appealing considering how few profitable silicon valley companies there are these days. On the other hand, I have a hard time interpreting whether this is truly a profitable company since the numbers are all over the place. It also looks like Q3 tends to be the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pg is surprisingly prescient in his predictions about the potential size of the opportunity. This might just be survivorship bias though, but still, one takeaway I got from the email exchanges is that pg really evaluated founders on both the idea/market opportunity and the qualities of the founders themselves: I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before. We had big doubts about this idea, but…
It's interesting that they both missed the real killer edge here. Fred said it was Etsy, Paul said it would move up into hotels. Neither are really what happened. Turns out in most places it's profitable to arbitrage long term property cost and AirBnB income. So you have a bunch of small time operators buying or leasing property and putting them on AirBnB. AFAICT that seems to be the bulk of AirBnB business. Not Etsy…
The most important part of Airbnb is creating a hotel "chain" or "brand" without having to deal with things like zoning or licensing or insurance for hotels.
While Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Hyatt/Accor/Choice/Wyndham/etc collect 10% to 20% in exchange for putting their brand on the line, Airbnb also was able to create a business where they can take 18% without putting their brand on the line, and keeping the ability to dump all the liability on the hosts. However, I think this is a weakness for Airbnb long term, but they may be able to take advantage in the short term.
Quality control for real world products, especially volatile ones such as abodes rented night after night, are costly and I'm willing to pay a premium to make sure there are some double or triple checks going on.