Takeaways

• The vast majority of hosts on Airbnb are on the smaller side - just over 99% of hosts have five or fewer listings.

• Although enterprise-level hosts are a small fraction of those active on the platform, they collectively list over 2,800 properties and tend to focus on either whole property ("entire home / apt") or shared space ("private room") listings.

• Enterprise hosts listing whole units out-price small and mid-market hosts by a large margin in both the Bronx and Brooklyn, though average nightly rates are much more clustered in Manhattan.

While Airbnb's platform business model makes both customer and host segmentation a necessity, today we'll be focusing on hosts given the data available to us. In total the platform has over 37,000 hosts offering accommodations in New York, the vast majority of which (86%) only have one listing. Hosts with over 10+ listings are a small fraction of those active on the platform but do have a strong reach, collectively listing over 2,800 properties.

Borrowing a page from the SaaS sales playbook, we'll utilize small, mid-market, and enterprise to define and categorize hosts on the platform. Small hosts are those that have only one listing. I think it's fair to keep these individuals in a category of their on as the jump between managing one listing and several is substantial. While it would be simpler to group our hosts into two categories - single listing vs. multi-listing - the division doesn't fully capture the level of professionalization that happens as the amount of listings increases. Put otherwise, maintaining four rental properties is very different than maintaining forty. With that in mind, we'll draw a line at 10 properties and use mid-market to categories hosts that manage between two and nine listings and enterprise to categorize those with ten or more listings.

A few insights:

• Small hosts are less likely to offer shared room listings than larger hosts (either mid-market or enterprise) and are more likely to offer private room listings.

• Enterprise hosts listing whole units out-price small and mid-market hosts by a large margin in both the Bronx and Brooklyn, though average nightly rates are much more clustered in Manhattan.

• Enterprise hosts tend to be more focused on entire home / apt listings. When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense - if you have the means to acquire and time to manage a dozen properties, it seems logical that you'd want to maximize your earning potential by listing the entire property (which commands a higher nightly rate then a shared space listing).

Who are the hosts?

• Ten of the top hosts appear to be professional hosts - they manage dozens of properties and their listings have a certain slickness to them, with higher resolution photographs and very SEO-friendly written descriptions. That being said, the listings do not necessarily read "corporate" - if you didn't know what you were looking for, you would be hard pressed to discern that hosts like Vida were anything beyond a quirky Brooklynite that's listing the top floor apartment of their walkup.

• The rest are a mix of short-term apartment rental companies (219517861, 107434423, and 12243051), corporate housing managers (61391963) and a very active listing agent (205031545). For short-term apartment rental companies, Airbnb is an easy way to get your property in front of prospective guests. MORE ANALYSIS

Location, Location, Location

• The majority of units from our top listing hosts (90%) can be found in Manhattan, though a host named Kazuya (137358866) has a booming rental business with a focus on Queens and Vida (7503643) has focused her listings exclusively within Brooklyn.