Airbnb warns of MAJOR reset. (40% losses emerge)

Airbnb's CEO just launched a massive indirect warning towards the U.S. housing market. He's now saying that Airbnb is fundamentally changing as a company and that they are now going to become the Amazon of travel, diversifying into things like hotels and car rentals. Now, while this might be good for Airbnb as a corporate brand, it is not so good for the Airbnb hosts and operators of America. They are now facing increased competition, declining demand, and many are now being forced to liquidate at big losses. I am standing here just southwest of Orlando, Florida, in the Airbnb epicenter of America. And what I'm seeing quite literally is shocking. In this community I'm walking around in right now, there's over 20 Airbnb short-term rentals for sale. That's 18 percent of all the units in this area. Their original core business of having people rent out rooms in their homes and then rent out their entire home, that is now no longer growing the way it used to. According to AirDNA, demand to book Airbnbs in the U.S. was only up 2 percent year-over-year in July 2026. That was even with the World Cup, only a 2 percent year-over-year increase in Airbnb booking demand. And we are seeing absolute carnage play out in the market. Just a couple blocks down from where I'm standing right now, there's an Airbnb on the market, everyone, at a $200,000 loss. The owner bought it for $699 back in 2023. It's now on the market for $495, a $204,000, 30 percent haircut in just three years for an Airbnb operator here around the corner. Up in Nashville, where I live full time, there's Airbnb owners also taking big losses. This is an Airbnb, an owner bought in Nashville for $999,000. It's now listed for $599,000, a $400,000 loss. And an interesting question to ask is what's going to be the impact on the U.S. housing market from this, with this Airbnb crash actually playing out in real time today in 2026? Will we see this drag down home prices? Will we see this spread? And I think we already are. Because when we pull up data on ReVenture app, we could see that home values are going down 13 percent already in this zip code to the southwest of Disney. You can see a vacation market like Sevierville, Tennessee, is also down double digits. A vacation market like Punta Gorda, Florida, is also down 20 percent on value. Phoenix is down close to 10 percent. A lot of these vacation markets with a lot of the Airbnbs are already losing value across the entire market. Now, I actually polled you guys and I asked you the question, what do you think about Airbnb, particularly like if it was in your area, your neighborhood? Do you like it? Do you dislike it? Do you think it should be allowed? Do you think it should be banned? And the results were pretty interesting. I'm going to show you the results from this poll, because I think it also signals maybe an issue that Airbnb's core business model has. It's the fact that so far in this poll, only 20 percent of you say that you actually like Airbnb, the concept of it being in your area. 30 percent of you say you don't like Airbnb, but you think it should be allowed, while 50 percent of you say you don't like Airbnb and you think it should be restricted. So we have a vast majority of you, almost four fifths, saying you don't like Airbnb. Only one fifth of you saying you do like Airbnb. And then half of you overall think there should be some restrictions placed on Airbnb, which is what a lot of cities are trying to do. A really interesting situation right now is Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City on July 1st just passed sweeping regulation restricting Airbnb short term rental operations. In particular, they put a 200 night cap on an individual owner's house or apartment that they were renting out. They can't rent it for more than 200 nights a year. In this article from the Salt Lake City Tribune, they were talking to local operators and they're saying with that cap, it's impossible to make money. It cuts their revenue potential 40, 50 percent. And a lot of them are thinking of selling. Now, interestingly, Airbnb is threatening legal action now against Salt Lake City, sending a cease and desist order to the municipality. And this is fascinating, folks. So Salt Lake City is trying to take some action to restrict the Airbnbs. Airbnb is sending them a cease and desist. Here's why. According to Airbnb, the city of Salt Lake City and some of their representatives are creating fake Airbnb accounts, trying to lure hosts into accepting reservations that the city deems illegal. And then the city views that as evidence to then fine or reprimand the owners. Airbnb is saying that's a violation of their terms of service. Now, folks, I just want to take a quick second and explain to you how I actually even found this community and figured out the prices were dropping in this area of Orlando. I used ReVenture app to target the areas in Florida where prices have dropped the most over the last four years. We have a data point called percentage change from 2022. That's how much values have gone up or down since what we consider the peak of the housing bubble four years ago. And Orlando, as well as this county in this zip code, showed some of the highest drops in our analysis, which is what brought me here to look further into these homes and discover this Airbnb downturn. And what I'm amazed at is even though the prices are dropping for these Airbnbs, particularly in these Airbnb centric communities, they're still pretty expensive. Like, if I look at this map here on Zillow, we're still seeing Airbnbs for 1.25 million, 880,000, 700,000, 635,000. I mean, despite the prices dropping, these still are expensive. And in a second, I'm actually gonna do a little math for you guys and show you how much these Airbnb owners are making on some of these properties, because I'll use some data from some Airbnb providers to show you just why there's so many now for sale. It's getting increasingly difficult to make money on some of these. But first, I want to draw an important distinction between the Airbnb and short term rental host versus Airbnb corporate. This is an important distinction to make. As I said in the beginning, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, is saying they're expanding. Right. They're going to try to become the Amazon of travel. All of your travel needs you could find potentially through Airbnb. Airbnb is trying to get more and more hotels signed up on their platform. And of course, Airbnb is also expanding markets. Their biggest growth markets now are not in America, but they're in Latin America. They're in Europe. They're in Asia. So in Airbnb's most recent earnings, they actually reported really solid numbers. Their revenue grew 15 percent year over year. Their stock price popped. Their stock price is actually at one of the highest levels it's been at in the last five years. And actually, Airbnb's business is very impressive. They have a 30 percent profit margin at this point for a company that hasn't been around that long. And they're actually making money, which is rare for a tech company these days. And so Airbnb corporate's very healthy. But the reason it's healthy is because it started to commoditize travel offerings. And that commoditization of travel offerings is coming at the expense of some of the individual owners. There's a lot of owners here who got started on Airbnb maybe five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago. And when they did, there was much less competition. It was easier to book rooms. Now, in an area like this, the occupancy rate is only about 55 percent over the course of a year. And if you zoom in here, like on the Airbnb bookings for this neighborhood, like I was doing earlier, it's actually kind of strange. Like many of the listings don't even show up on the map on my phone. It says like 88 homes, but then only maybe 10 show up. And then I zoom in further. It says 20 homes, but only 10 show up. And you have to zoom in really, really close to see all of the different properties. And so what I'm wondering is if we just have like oversaturation, oversupply of the traditional Airbnb host buying a house and then putting it on Airbnb. I think there's just too many, too much supply. And as a result, Airbnb's algorithm might be punishing some of these owners, maybe who have lower ratings or might be overpricing their homes a bit. And maybe they don't even get shown. That's what it seems like to me just looking right now on my phone for this area. And so while Airbnb corporate loves the idea of more supply on the market and actually wants owners to lower the prices of their houses. So right behind me, folks, we have these like townhomes. We have three for sale almost right next to each other for a range of $635,000 to $680,000, six bed, five bath, 2,300 square feet. You can see in the listings, they talk openly about how it's an Airbnb investment turnkey. Often they're sold furnished, investment opportunity. Well, here's the issue. Right now, the rates around here are about $300 per night for these six bed townhouses. If you do some math and project that out over the year at 55 percent occupancy, you get what's called a rev par revenue per available room or listing of around $190 to $195. You multiply that by 365 days in a year. You get annual revenue around $60,000 for one of these townhomes estimate. And again, these are just some of my estimates by looking at the data. There might be some variation in their exact numbers, but let's just say $60,000 in revenue. OK, well, on one hand, you might say that's good. That's $5,000 a month. However, that's just the top line. You've got to deduct the expenses. In many cases, these Airbnbs need professional management, people to manage the listing, to manage responding to guests, to manage the cleaners, to manage the chat. Often that costs 15 to 20 percent of revenue off the top. So then you probably got management for maybe $9,000 to $10,000 a year. And you got property taxes, which are actually kind of expensive, around $8,000 a year estimated on Zillow. And you're going to have your insurance costs. You're going to have basic maintenance costs. You know, obviously people are coming to these Airbnbs and sometimes maybe damaging them a bit. So probably heavy R&M. So your $60,000 annual revenue really probably is only like $30,000 in net income, meaning that the $630,000 asking price would be at a 4.8 percent cap rate on income, which is way too low, way too low a cap rate in this market. The price of these townhomes has got to go down much further before the buyers are going to come back in. And according to the data we have on ReVenture app, in this zip code supply through the roof, 1,200 homes for sale, the demand and the sales close to the lowest level in 10 years. The central story here for the traditional Airbnb host who buys a property, hopes to rent it out, is that their revenue growth has slowed significantly, might even be going negative, especially if they're not like a top tier host. While their expenses are going up and if, you know, maybe they finance their property with debt, then they might not even be covering their expenses at all. There was actually a big boom in 2021, 2022 in what's called DSCR loans, high risk Airbnb lending. Bloomberg reported on this at the time back in 2022, how these DSCR loans, which were underwritten not to the borrower's income, but to the cash flow from the property, you know, made it pretty easy to actually get mortgages to buy these homes. But now if the cash flow drops, those DSCR loans go below their coverage ratio. Owners maybe are at a high likelihood of walking away. That example I told you about before, just a couple of blocks down the road, it's a short sale. Again, bought it for $699 as an Airbnb short term rental. It's now $494, $200,000 loss. And you just look here on Zillow, look at all the listings here southwest of Orlando. I mean, this is the supply glut. Now, I do kind of feel bad, actually, for some of these Airbnb hosts, because many of them, especially those who got in in the last five years, they were tricked and deceived into thinking that buying a property, buying a house and turning it into an Airbnb was this way that they could just make it rich and develop all this passive income. And there was just so much content on social media at the time about how, you know, this couple quit their jobs and operate five Airbnbs and make $20,000 a month. And so many people just thought it was that easy because no one in the market was really warning them, which should say other than this channel, myself and maybe a couple other people. No one was warning them. Everyone was kind of pushing these people to get in. And I think we could be on the doorstep of an extended decline as a result. The operations and the math just doesn't make sense. There's still so much supply on the market here in Orlando. The supply has dropped 4% year over year, but there's still over 43,000 short term rental listings in Orlando. Now, another interesting comparison, I think, for you guys to think about in terms of Airbnb and its future impact on the housing market is to also think about Uber. Airbnb and Uber to me are very similar businesses. They both commoditized people, you know, sharing their house or sharing their car and earning revenue off it. And many people piled in to work with these companies because you could actually make money with them for a long time. Like, I remember a decade ago hearing stories of people driving Ubers, making six figures. Of course, fast forward to today, it's not that way at all. There's tons of Uber supply on the market, tons of drivers. And now you have self-driving cars and Waymo's competing. And essentially the excess profits for doing that and driving an Uber have been largely competed away. And it's not the money making enterprise it once was 10 years ago. I think the same thing is happening with Airbnb, right? So 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, it was maybe kind of easy to make some money buying a property, being the Airbnb host. Now it is much harder, a lot of supply competition. And you have Airbnb corporate pivoting to things like hotels, providing more competition. And then also Airbnb corporate folks is now changing the rules. Hosts now need to pay the entire fee. The entire Airbnb fee, close to 15%, used to be paid 3% by hosts, 12% by guests. Starting in a month or two in 2026, that will be paid 100% by the host. You as the guest won't see the fee on your end. Now, in some cities, the share of Airbnb rentals is much higher. Like I said, here in Orlando, 43,000 short-term rental listings on 1.2 million housing units. That means 3.5% of all the housing stock rentals. And most of them are entire homes that are on the market for more than 180 days, meaning that the owners don't live there full time and they're treating it purely as an investment. Don't be surprised, folks, if those shares and number of listings drops in future years and we see more struggling Airbnb owners forced to liquidate homes on the U.S. housing market, which, hey, might actually be good news for the average U.S. homebuyer or the average renter could mean cheaper prices at the same time. While that's happening, expect Airbnb corporate to still do well and have 30% profit margins because they have now moved on and expanded their business to other countries, other continents and other segments, including booking hotels and renting cars and booking experiences. To see if this Airbnb downturn is impacting your market, what you should do right now is download ReVenture app and check out our 2027 home price forecast for your area. We have this forecast for every single zip code in the U.S. Our forecast is the best performing housing market forecast that's widely available to homebuyers and investors. We performed four times better than Zillow in 2025 in terms of predicting price movements at the metro level. And this forecast is invaluable for you as a buyer, investor or seller so you can understand where the market's heading and make a more informed decision. We're forecasting prices in this zip code to drop 5.2% in the next year, furthering their correction. But there's other parts of Orlando, the U.S., where we think prices are going to go up. You're going to want to know that forecast before you buy or sell. If you want to access housing market analytics that allow you to see where the market's heading and find the best deals, download ReVenture mobile today and upgrade to our premium plan so you can access our housing market map, 2027 forecast and use our listings analyzer to see how much you should offer on the houses in your area.