Viral report says Myrtle Beach No. 4 in USA for Airbnb revenue drop. Here’s what we know
A single Tuesday afternoon tweet has experts and analysts debating the performance of Airbnb in the Grand Strand.
According to the June 27 post, Airbnb revenue per available listing has dramatically fallen in several big cities in 2023 compared to the previous year, and Myrtle Beach saw the fourth worst drop-off in the country.
Myrtle Beach Airbnb hosts faced a 45 percent decrease in revenue per available listing, according to the tweet. Other major cities that saw sharp declines were Phoenix, Austin, Nashville, Denver, New Orleans, Seattle and Orlando.
The Airbnb collapse is real.
Revenues are down nearly 50% in cities like Phoenix and Austin.
Watch out for a wave of forced selling from Airbnb owners later this year in the areas hit hardest by the revenue collapse. pic.twitter.com/xjGkj7bFC5— Nick Gerli (@nickgerli1) June 27, 2023
The tweet was published by Reventure Consulting CEO Nick Gerli. According to its website, Reventure provides data to real estate companies to help them make better investments.
Airbnb has said Gerli’s tweet and data are inaccurate.
“The data is not consistent with our own data,” Airbnb said in a statement to Newsweek. “As we said during our Q1 earnings, more guests are traveling on Airbnb than ever before.”
Gerli also sparked reactions from other analysts who track the company’s performance. Jamie Lane, chief economist of the short-term rental intelligence firm AirDNA, also disputed Gerli’s findings.
Lane said Airbnb’s business was down nationwide, but only by 3.6 percent compared to 2022. According to AirDNA’s data, Myrtle Beach’s revenue per available listing is actually up 5.5 percent from last year.
A viral tweet about STR data! Lets get some facts straight... There is not a collapse in RevPAL happening. Is it down in 2023? YES. Is it down 40%? NO.
I've pulled the numbers from @airdna's dataset mirroring the analysis done by @nickgerli1. What do we find? The average… pic.twitter.com/HRjIXZk9p9— Jamie Lane (@Jamie_Lane) June 28, 2023
It’s unclear how well Airbnb is performing in the Grand Strand. The Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce and Convention & Visitor Bureau also tracks short-term rental data with its lodging dashboard. However, it includes other services like VRBO as well as Airbnb in its data.
The Chamber of Commerce and CVB lodging dashboard reported that revenue per available room was down about 6 percent for the week of June 18-24 from 2022. But the dashboard also showed that revenue per available room was up about 21 percent from 2019 for the same week.
Airbnb hosts in Myrtle Beach also gave conflicting reports on performance. Host Bryan Runyan said revenue and occupancy were down compared to 2022 but better than in 2021.
