Nothing is for free.
If you read their FAQ, you will see that they will start a premium listing program.
So at start it will be a good site, but once they get popular, your listing will be very hard to find unless you pay extra to get on top.
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I posted long ago that in my experience to buy a property to make income with Air or other short term rentals is very risky. It might work if one knows business well, but most people went into this with zero knowledge of what to do with STRs like myself and hoping for a bit of extra pocket money. Then extra pocket money turned out to be much more, and then a possiblity of a new venture came up.
Only now 19 months later, i started to understand a bit how it works for me, how to maximize my profit with minimum effort. But it took me a lot of work, thinking, analyzing non stop, and still i am not sure if i got it 100% right.
I think a person can succeed very well with Air if a new property is bought with a purpose to invest, retirement project or for whatever long term purpose. But if only one aim in mind is to secure income its very risky.
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The problem is that AirBnB is new, and cities and governments are still catching up.
Once they get up to speed, and start enforcing the rules, investments can get worthless pretty quick.
A good example is Berlin, where they now require a license to list on AirBnB.
Amsterdam has an agreement with AirBnB (60day max per year, 4 guest per property), but AirBnb does not check or enforce, so Amsterdam is gearing up special teams to close down illegal AirBnBâs.
More and more European cityâs are now gearing up, they have had it with the pestering by the American multinational, and start fighting the illegal hosts. And with illegal they do not mean the simple guy that rents out one of their rooms (20%), but the investors that illegally run complete hotels (80% of the listings in the big cities).
I wonder how hard it is to obtain license to do short terms. I paid 86$ for a year, the whole thing took 2 minutes. Noone checked the property. I paid , they took my money, end of story.
There are other sites though where these investors can get their guests. I mean in general, Air or no Air, to rely on income from properties in first years is fantasizing. Especially when these investors never managed a property, and never operated as hotels.
I think what attracts these people is the possibility of seemingly effortlessly make some significant money and have a larger gain on their capital. It all looks good on paper, but then there are damages, slow times, and other issues.
Those who just want to invest cash that is laying around have nothing to loose, but those who are getting a mortgage or, worse, borrowing money to buy a house for this specific purpose, to do Air, might be in for a big dissapointment.
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That is exactly the big lie in the AirBnB marketing.
Their marketing is about the little guy using AirBnB to make ends meet, while in reality 80% of the hosts are rich investors that have plenty of money.
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What is this figure based on? Did you read it in an article or is it based on your market?
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Check out www.insideairbnb.com for third party data on the biggest markets drawn from among other things, Airbnb code itself. Fascinating.
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@jaquo, I like to list and work with you. I am in the process of updating my property and than I have somewhat a busy October, but in November and December I will have some time.
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@jaquo, Great questions and great answer. It brought up a question on my end. It appears that from the articles and the listing, you are more in to upscale type of travel. If a listing is less of an upscale but unique in nature, would it fit
within the frame of your website. I did work in Travel Industry and your site reminds me a bit of Conde Nast.
Thatâs a great compliment - thank you 
Iâm sure that your listing will fit in very well. Iâd like the site to cater to all travellers, on every sort of budget. Just let me know when youâre ready for me to write about your property.
Not sure I would trust this. For BOSTON there are about 40 listings that are not in Boston but have been miscalculated. They are trusting the owner/listers to have not âstretchedâ the boundaries of the city.
This is the data straight from the AirBnB API.
So the same data AirBnB uses.
They are very open about the data they have, you can download the filtered data from their site and do your own analysis.
Oh, even better.
You can click a listing on the map, then click on the host and it goes to the AirBnB page of the host. So you can can confirm the data yourself.
I am editing and updating the list in the OP of issues that come up.
This is fascinating data and quite a large sample, about 20% of their total listings. Iâd love to see more suburban and rural data.
Very valid argument - gaining guest trust is key, or youâre never going to take any bookings on your own site. There are plenty of ways you can achieve this trust using things like social proof.
For example, the VeriSign seal is considered the number 1 trust sign on the internet. So investing in verifying your website via VeriSign and being able to display the badge on your site will really help any potential bookers make their decision, as theyâll immediately know their payment is safe and secure.
So you say that if placed a Verisign badge in my website then my visitors will instantly know that my site is safe to make a transaction. They will never think that I could get it from a standard google search.
J, how do you get a link into your Abnb listingâŚassuming I read you correctly.
Hi Aj,
Three main ways. The first is social media. These links, especially Google+, are shown in search engine results. Then I have two websites (one is devoted to travel) and I link to the listing on those. Also I have a website for the listing which links straight through to Airbnb.
Iâm always happy to write articles about hosts here and their listings.