Until recently, visitors to New York essentially had two options: hotel rooms or short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. But in September 2023, the city began enforcing a 2022 law that prohibited people from renting out their homes for less than 30 days (unless the host was staying in the home with guests).
Now hotel rooms are the only legitimate option for people visiting the city – and they are unaffordable for many. Most hotels in Times Square don’t have rooms for less than $300 a night. A search on Thursday, May 2 turned up the Muse for $356, Hampton Inn for $323, and the Hard Rock for $459 (although these may change frequently due to dynamic pricing). They become even more expensive. Hotel rates rose twice as fast as inflation between the first quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2023, said Jan Freitag, an analyst at real estate data firm CoStar Group.
Many visitors and New Yorkers have turned to the black rental market, where Facebook groups, Craigslist posts, Instagram listings and word of mouth have become the go-to place for finding short-term rentals in the five boroughs.
If you have friends in New York, you’ve probably seen the Instagram stories. “Hi guys! I’m subletting my room in a 5 bedroom apartment for four days over Easter! Must be good with dogs and rude roommates! DM if interested!”
Other travelers have headed to New Jersey, making the kaleidoscope of cities across the Hudson River the fastest-growing market for Airbnb demand in the country, according to analytics site AirDNA. Others have raised money for hotels, which are only expected to become more expensive in the coming years. For many tourists, there is not yet a good answer to the so-called Airbnb ban.
Yoya Busquets, 56, was considering an Airbnb in New Jersey, but really wants to be in the city when she visits from Barcelona in early September with her husband and two teenage daughters. She poked around on Facebook and chatted with some people on Messenger who were advertising short-term rentals there. The last time she was in New York, in 2012, she stayed in an Airbnb in Brooklyn, and she wants a similar experience. Maybe she’s just lucky.
“I’m communicating with a girl who has a place available for a week and it’s listed on Airbnb as if it’s in New Jersey, but when you contact them they say it’s in Brooklyn,” she said.
The apartment also happens to be close to the area she stayed in last time, and it falls within her budget of $160 per night. It’s the best option she’s found, considering the cost of hotels and the space it gives her daughters to relax after a busy day. But the scheme is likely to fall foul of the new laws, which is why the apartment is listed in Jersey.
According to AirDNA, which tracks data from short-term rental sites like Airbnb and HomeAway, listings for stays of less than 30 days have fallen 83% since August 2023, when the regulations went into effect. At one time, there were 22,200 short-term listings available in New York City; According to AirDNA, there are now only 3,700.
While juggling her thesis, finishing her classes and looking for a job that will allow her to continue living in the US, 24-year-old Tehsin Pala is looking for a place for her family to stay in May when she graduates from New York University. journalism program.
“This is their first time coming to New York City and I want to give them a good experience,” Pala, from India, said of her parents and grandmother. “I thought I wanted to set up an Airbnb so I could cook for them too,” so she was stunned to learn that short-term rentals really weren’t an option anymore.
Pala wants a place where her family has space to gather. As a show of gratitude and respect, she wants to cover the costs of her family’s accommodation and has budgeted around $200 (£160) per night for their week-long stay.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Pala said. “Probably a hotel, but I have to pay like $400 a night and I don’t have that kind of money.”
Now saddled with the dual pressures of finishing school and facing low hotel rates, she finds herself at a crossroads: choose a hotel and have her parents pay for or rent something in New York on short notice that is technically is not possible? legal?
Without the accountability and protection that platforms like Airbnb provided, avoiding scams has become a normal part of looking for a short-term rental. That’s why Pala skipped scanning Craigslist altogether. Now she’s considering booking an Airbnb in New Jersey, but she fears the slog on the local Path train could be difficult for her grandmother.
While the regulations were passed with the intention of curbing rents for New Yorkers by putting apartment inventory back on the market, they have also cut off an often crucial source of income for New York renters and homeowners who lived in their apartments but list properties. places when they were out of town. Some New Yorkers are still finding ways to raise the money.
Kathleen, whose last name is being withheld for privacy reasons, only recently started renting out her East Village apartment on the black rental market. The 29-year-old travels extensively for her work in personal finance and to visit family in North Carolina. She’s out of town about four months a year, she said, and of course still has to pay her $2,600 a month rent when she’s not there. To make up for some of that lost money, she has started connecting with people for unregulated stays through Facebook groups.
“I really vetted a lot of people,” she said, citing concerns about how her space would be treated since she wouldn’t get the protections that short-term rental platforms provide to landlords. She has two prospective guests — a weekend visitor and one who stays in her apartment for three weeks during the summer — who pay her $50 a night.
“I’m always a fussier,” she said. “If you can make extra money, why wouldn’t you make extra money? I live in a great location. I love my place and it’s very clean and I thought if anyone was new to this town it would be a nice, cute place to be.”
It’s the kind of place that visitors like Juan José Tejada could argue for. Tejada, a wellness influencer from Bogotá, Colombia, is visiting New York for nine days in July with his best friend. He started his search for a place by scanning hotels, but quickly realized they were too expensive.
“I’m 25 years old. I’m traveling with my best friend. And you know, we don’t have that much budget,” he said. At the suggestion of a cousin who lives in the city, Tejada used Facebook to look for a short-term rental What he found was that he quadrupled his budget from $100 to $200 per night. But that wasn’t the only problem.
“When I was looking for a short-term rental, the payment situation was a little difficult,” says Tejada, “because the people who rent say ‘you have to pay me by bank transfer or through Zelle’ or some other service they have we are not in Colombia.”
I come from a city where the Airbnb craziness is essentially taking the locals away
Yoya Busquets from Barcelona
Tejada and his friend ended up booking at Hi New York City, a hostel on the Upper West Side, which cost them about $55 a night for a spot in a bunk room with a shared bathroom. Tejada said he had considered an Airbnb with an on-site host but had not found suitable options. It’s not the apartment he dreamed of being able to breeze in and out of like he was a local, but it will do.
People create their own solutions for short stays. On Instagram, there are accounts like Book That Sublet NYC, where more than 4,000 followers tune in to sub rentals often posted daily and weekly, as well as the endless “book my apartment!” or apartment swap highlights shared on Instagram Stories. And then there are the old apartment exchange sites, like HomeExchange or HomeLink, which offer visitors another way to get their foot in the door of a city apartment.
Supporters of the new regulations believed that capping short-term rental prices would bring long-term rentals back onto the market — and perhaps help lower rents in the notoriously expensive city. About seven months later, those broad-scale effects remain to be seen, said Jamie Lane, AirDNA’s chief economist.
Related: ‘We’re in a housing desert’: Will Airbnb’s crackdown work in New York in a month?
Jonathan Miller, CEO of valuation firm Miller Samuel, provided a statement: He said a modest number of apartments had returned to the rental market after the law was changed, but as mortgage rates remain high and have risen again since the start of the new crisis . This year, potential buyers will be priced out of the market for the time being, causing rents to rise.
Pala, the NYU student, doesn’t think the regulations are the most effective way to address New York’s housing crisis. “I don’t understand how this arrangement makes sense, not in terms of reducing the burden of the number of Airbnbs that exist, but in terms of how fair this decision is to the people of New York City, given that it is an immigrant city, ” she said.
But Busquets, who is visiting in September, has witnessed first-hand the effects tourism and short-term rentals can have on a world-famous destination.
“I come from a city where the Airbnb craziness is essentially driving away locals and people who have lived there for years,” she said. “The owners wanted to keep the people who were there to rent it out on a short-term basis because it’s more profitable.”
Busquets said Airbnb made Barcelona unliveable and that she eventually left for the suburbs herself. She added: “It has changed. It is not the same city as it was ten or fifteen years ago.”