How can you earn more as Airbnb host?

How can you earn more as Airbnb host?

  If an investor wants to invest in a house as an Airbnb host in Seattle, how will the investor get a higher income? There are three aspects for investors to increase their income. First, get the high rent of the house; secondly, increase the occupancy rate; thirdly, reduce the cost.

First, how can we get high housing rent?

  First, what is the average price of Airbnb in Seattle? Because we know the benchmark  of average price for rent, we can start looking for similar goals with higher average price. From the calendar dataset, we can get the following figure. This is a trend figure for 2016 average rent in Seattle.

   The above picture shows that housing rents in Seattle are more seasonal. The rent price gradually rose from the lowest average price of $115 in February to the peak of $155 in July, and then the high level lasted for 2 months. From September, it began to fall to around $135 in December, and then began to slowly pick up.Can we find a house with similar benchmark fluctuations but higher average price? According to the calendar and lists datasets, we can find the following:

  The rents of the three neighborhoods are high and volatile. The rent starts at around $150 and reaches a maximum of $250, then falls to around $160. These rents are significantly higher than the benchmark.  So the neighborhoods we can choose to invest in are: Downtown, Queen Anne, and Cascade.
So what property type do we invest in these neighborhoods? From the listings dataset we find that the distribution of the overall property type is:

At the same time, the statistics of the three neighborhoods of Downtown, Queen Anne and Cascade in the listings are as follows:

So more apartments and houses are available in these neighborhoods so that we can choose them easily. We can observe the two types of price trends:

  The above chart shows that the average price of the target property types is higher than the benchmark, so they are suitable targets.

Second, how to improve the occupancy rate?

  The occupancy rate is strongly correlated with the reviews per month. The reviews per month can be used as a proxy of the occupancy rate. The following results were obtained from the data set learning according to the machine learning algorithm.
 

The occupation rate is positive correlation with reviews_per_month.

• number_of_reviews: number_of_reviews has a great impact on reviews_per_month. Incentives are needed to motivate customers to review the accommodation.
• id is listings id. The listings ID is strongly related to the years provided by the host. So the longer you provide accommodation on Airbnb, the more people live your house and the more reviews you make each month.
• amenities_lenght: it converts from amenities. the more services the host provides, the greater the impact on the number of monthly reviews. The amenities will be analyzed later.
•  latitude, longitude: they are location information. The previous neighborhood analysis also provides the same information and select target neighborhoods. Good location, more customer check-in, more reviews per month.

Finally, how to save costs?

   The cost of housing is mainly composed of the rooms and the cost of providing amenities. How can we save costs without affecting rent? From the data set, we can get the following five important weights related to the price:

  The main features related with cost are bedrooms and accommodates in above figure. Futher analyzing features correlation in listings data set, we can known the typical composition of the room and the the number of accomodate, it can be seen that the housing configuration of all neighborhoods is typically as follows:

 When investing in a house or apartment, we need to focus on the necessary configuration of most of these houses, and do not add some facilities that slightly affect the price. Second, we can analyze the indicators data and consider those that must be provided to control costs. The top six components of the amenities column in the neighborhoods are as follows:

Considering whether the presence or absence of these components affects reviews_of_month, we can get the following picture:

 
We can know that WIFI internet plays important role in customers' select room. Hosts who provide WIFI get their property booked a lot more than those who don't. And customers tend to book properties without kitchen and dryer. Aparments with heating , smoke detector and essentials tend to get more booking as well. Probably in the US, heating is important if customers travel to Seattle in winter.

Conclusion

  If we want to earn more as Airbnb host in Seattle, we should invest house or apartment in Downtown, Queen Anne and Cascade. And the houses or apartments has typical configuration with 2 accommodates,1 bathrooms    bedrooms, 1 beds.  In order to increase the occupancy rate, Incentives are needed to motivate customers to review the accommodation. We should provide more suitable amenities. But in order to save costs, some amenities that slightly affect the occupancy rate are removed, leaving only: Wireless Internet, Heating, Smoke Detector, Essentials and other basic amenities to reduce costs. When you do these jobs, you may get a higher income.
 

Github link: https://github.com/bin-wang-sh/Airbnb-Seattle-Analysis