Airbnb Says Comptroller Should Retract Report On Rent Hikes

NEW YORK, NY — Airbnb said the city comptroller should retract a report blaming the short-term rental website for driving up New York City rents, calling it a doctored attack on the company's middle-class hosts.

In a conference call with reporters Monday, Chris Lehane, Airbnb's head of global policy, said Comptroller Scott Stringer undermined the public's trust in his office with a misleading analysis that relied on data his office "improperly obtained" from AirDNA, a private analytics website.

"What has been disclosed about this data being manipulated and improperly obtained raises some serious questions that only the comptroller can answer," Lehane said.

Airbnb has aggressively contested Stringer's report, published last week, that found the company was responsible for about 9 percent of the total citywide rent increase from 2009 to 2016. The company has alleged that the hotel industry, one of its biggest political foes, was behind the report, a charge Stringer's office denied.

AirDNA, the independent company whose data the report cited, said the analysis overstated Airbnb's impact on the city's housing market because it conflated all types of Airbnb listings and didn't distinguish between active and inactive listings.

Airbnb and AirDNA have also raised questions about how the comptroller's office got the AirDNA data. Stringer's office would have had to pay to use the figures cited in the report, but the company has no record of any such payment, AirDNA CEO Scott Shatford told The New York Times.

In a Monday letter to Stringer, Lehane asked how and when the data was obtained, how the comptroller's office drew its "bad conclusions" from it, and how much the report cost to prepare and distribute. He suggested the comptroller may have gotten the data from a third party that "misled or perhaps even duped" him.

"Democracy cannot function if the public cannot trust the integrity of information disseminated by government," Lehane wrote. "So it is critically important — not just for Airbnb, but for the public — to have answers to these questions."

More than 70 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York City rely on the money they earn from sharing their homes to help cover their own housing costs, Lehane said.

But the comptroller stood by his report, saying Airbnb was just trying to discredit indpendent research that made the company look bad. He called on the firm to release comprehensive data on all its hosts so the city can more easily go after people who rent out apartments illegally.

"Airbnb’s high-priced lobbyists are doing what they always do when confronted with facts they don’t like, which is hold press conferences to try and smear those who dare to question the company’s impact on cities," Stringer said in a statement.

In a "fact sheet," the comptroller's office said a senior economist used accepted statistical methods to analyze data anyone can access for free on AirDNA's website.

The analysis calculated the average effect of Airbnb listings on rent prices, regardless of the type or duration, and counted multiple listings at the same address as one listing so as not to overstate the impact, Stringer's office said.

"Our analysis employed a sound methodology similar to that used in other studies that have reached the same conclusions that we did – namely that Airbnb listings lead to higher rents," Lena Bell, a spokeswoman for Stringer, said in a statement.

(Lead image: Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)