Airbnb supply and performance - small area summaries

The Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) conducts a daily web scraping exercise for the Airbnb website, with the code for this exercise openly available. This exercise has been collecting daily information since 2020 on property characteristics, daily booking calendar updates, booking policies, host information, and guest reviews. Data are collected to support academic research by UBDC on the short-term rental sector (Wang 2023, 2024).

These aggregated tables are published as a by-product of that work. This dataset generated from the scraped web content estimates available and occupied listings, visits, occupancy rates and income by tracking individual listings' daily booking calendars, following the open method published by Wang et al. (2024). These metrics are key performance and stock indicators.

From June 2021, it has covered thirty Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) in Scotland and ten in other parts of the UK. The first version of the dataset covers the Scottish TTWAs only.

The dataset provides monthly estimates, covering a total of 30 months from June 2021 to December 2023. It is published at the Middle Super Output Area (MSOA)/Intermediate Zone (IZ) level for each TTWA, provided there are more than five observed Airbnb listings in that MSOA/IZ. MSOA is the term used in England and Wales, IZ is the term used in Scotland. For simplicity, we refer to both as MSOAs. MSOAs without sufficient observations are omitted.

Reference: Wang, Y., Livingston, M., McArthur, D.P. and Bailey, N., 2023. The challenges of measuring the short-term rental market, an analysis of open data on Airbnb activity. Housing Studies, pp.1-20. Wang, Y., Livingston, M., McArthur, D. P. and Bailey, N. (2024) Enhancing our understanding of short-term rental activity A daily scrape-based approach for airbnb listings Plos one, 19(2), pp. e0298131.

Access and restrictions

• Airbnb is available for UK Researchers only
• For non-commercial academic research only

The dataset provides monthly estimates, covering a total of 30 months from June 2021 to December 2023. It is published at the Middle Super Output Area (MSOA)/Intermediate Zone (IZ) level for each TTWA, provided there are more than five observed Airbnb listings in that MSOA/IZ. MSOA is the term used in England and Wales, IZ is the term used in Scotland. For simplicity, we refer to both as MSOAs. MSOAs without sufficient observations are omitted.

Indicators are defined based on data collected through web scraping.