Skift Take

Airbnb's global head of real estate talks about the company's side hustle, which you probably haven't heard about yet. The travel giant's rivals will listen and take notes.

Sean O'Neill

Airbnb claimed growing traction for a listing service where owners of multi-family properties allow tenants to rent out their units from time to time. The real-estate program, launched in the U.S. last November with about 175 buildings in 25 markets, now has 260 properties in 40 markets.

“About 35% of the housing stock is rentals, and we haven’t scratched the surface of that,” said Jesse Stein, global head of real estate at Airbnb, during an interview on-stage on June 7 at Skift’s Short-Term Rental Conference in New York City. 

Landlords are allowing rentals on Airbnb for roughly 100,000 U.S. apartments in exchange for a share of up to 25% of the revenue, Stein said in an interview with Seth Borko, a senior research analyst at Skift. (You can watch a full video and read a transcript below.)

https://youtu.be/c_iYOtUuyfI Interview Transcript

Seth Borko: Did you guys recognize the voice of God? It wasn't Jane who's been doing most of our "voice of God" [voiceover], did you recognize who it was?

Jesse Stein: I did. I did recognize it.

Borko: Who was it?

Stein: "The Terminator."

Borko: The Terminator, yeah. It's Brian Chesky, the Terminator as you call him, I believe.

Stein: Well, that's the chatbot, right?

Borko: ChatGPT, yeah/ So we had an AI-generated bot. We told you we had to mention AI. It's the last session of the day, hopefully, you've been keeping track. I'm going to quiz you all, to make sure you've got your right scorecard from that. So, all right. So Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you here, have Airbnb here. So you are the global head of real estate for Airbnb. Last I checked, Airbnb doesn't have any real estate, so…

Stein: Is anybody hiring, looking for…   I'm looking for a job. Yeah, no, I run global real estate for an asset like company. It's an interesting question I get all the time, but I think the real question is like, "What do I do?"

Borko: Yeah, what do you do, Jesse?

Stein: What do I do? So when you take a look at the space, for the most part, the STR industry has not really partnered with the largest institutional real estate owners in the world. And my job is really to come up with products and programs to bring in partners like Greystar, like Equity Residential,... these [firms] partner with us to unlock the ability for indiv