Rental Companies

The hosts with the most listings in Boston are short term rental companies, Seamless Transition with 70 listings and Maverick Empire with 43. Are these companies products or predecessors of Airbnb? The domain SeamlessTransistion.com was registered in March 2005, 3 years before Airbnb launched, and has had a website listing short term rentals since at least June 2007, one year before Airbnb launched in 2008. Maverick has had a website with short term rentals since April 2001 (Flash intro included!), seven years before Airbnb!

The Reviews

Since this data is publicly culled from Airbnb, we don’t know when listings are occupied, but we can try to use reviews as a proxy. For example, the most common days to write reviews are Mondays, likely right after weekend stays. Similarly, in May 2015, the most popular days to have posted reviews were May 19 and 30th, the days following Boston University’s and Harvard’s graduations. In April 2015, reviews spiked following the Marathon Monday long weekend.

The Most Common Days for Reviews are Mondays, Likely After Weekend Stays

Reviews Spike Following Long Weekends, such as Boston’s Marathon Monday

Cleanliness vs Cleaning Fee

Ranging from $5.00 to $100, 63% of listings have a cleaning fee. 44% of listings with a cleaning fee have a cleanliness rating of 10 out of 10 vs only 37% of listings without cleaning fee. Ironically, however, the listings with the highest average cleaning fees have a cleanliness rating of just 3 and 4! There’s just one listing with a cleanliness rating of 3, and it comes with a $50 cleaning fee.

Average Cleaning Fee per Cleanliness Rating

Summary

It would be exciting to get reservation data to confirm that spikes in posting times correlate with spikes in occupancy. Regardless, it’s interesting to see spikes in posts following weekends, holidays, and big events.

I was surprised to learn that the biggest listers on Airbnb, were renting short term rentals well before Airbnb even launched.

Lastly, it looks like cleaning fees don’t relate to cleanliness and are just a good way for hosts to charge a bit more!

VQL — Easy Data Analysis

The analysis above was done using VQL, a tool to ask questions of data without having to write code. If you’re interested in trying VQL, send us a line at hello@getvql.com. To see how this analysis was done, check out a video or a really long screenshot.

Thanks to Alex and Simon for reading drafts of this post.