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Airbnb small area summaries

Urban Big Data Centre, and Wang, Y. (2025) Airbnb small area summaries. [Data Collection]

Datacite DOI: 10.20394/9rroh1cx

Collection description

Overview:

Airbnb lists worldwide a selection of homes and boutique hotels available for booking holidays.

The Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) conducts a daily web scraping exercise for the Airbnb website, with the code for this exercise openly available at https://github.com/urbanbigdatacentre/ubdc-airbnb. 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.

UBDC extracts/organises Airbnb scraped data into structuralized interconnected parts including booking activities, customer reviews, spatial location, host status and structural and service amenities. This dataset is the Airbnb daily listings/calendar dataset.

. Airbnb daily listings/calendars
. Airbnb small area summaries

Airbnb small area summaries

Access and restrictions:

Access is only available to internal UBDC staff for non-commercial academic research use only. However the code for Airbnb webscraping is openly available at https://github.com/urbanbigdatacentre/ubdc-airbnb

More information:

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. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2023.2176829
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.

Funding: