• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, March 10, 2017

Even as Airbnb told the SEC it has raised another $1 billion in funding yesterday — bringing its total worth to northwards of $31 billion and pushing any IPO plans it may be considering further into the future — the lodging industry released a study charging the self-described “trusted community marketplace” with running “illegal hotels.” 

“The report debunks the story Airbnb likes to tell of themselves as merely a home-sharing platform where hardworking Americans may occasionally rent a room in their home,” says Katherine Lugar, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, which commissioned the analysis by CBRE Hotels’ Americas Research. 

“Hosts with Multiple Units — A Key Driver of Airbnb Growth” charges that Airbnb is “clearly no longer a mom and pop ‘hosting’ activity —it’s become a profitable commercial enterprise.” As such, it’s also driving up the cost of affordable housing, the study claims.

“Airbnb in particular and the short-term-rental industry in general is facilitating a housing crisis by incentivizing property investors to convert homes and apartments into illegal hotels, thus decreasing the available housing stock and driving rent prices up,” Peter Cohen, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations charges in the release touting the study.

The study “found that Airbnb hosts who rent out two or more properties in a single month represent the fastest-growing segment of the company’s revenue in the U.S.,” report Chris Kirkham and Greg Bensinger for the Wall Street Journal.

“The researchers found that revenue from hosts who operated two or more entire properties on the platform in 2016 nearly tripled from a year earlier, growing to more than $1.8 billion from about $611 million,” they continue. “Those multiunit hosts accounted for nearly a third of all U.S. revenue on Airbnb during a one-year period from October 2015 through September 2016, according to the analysis, up from about 25% a year earlier.”

Airbnb, as you might imagine, isn’t buying it.

“Airbnb spokesman Ben Breit wrote in an email that the report, which he called misleading and inaccurate, is the latest example of big hotels' ‘willingness to say and do anything to protect their record profits, preserve their ability to price gouge consumers and squash their competition,’” Ally Marotti reports for the Chicago Tribune after writing that 77% of Airbnb revenue in the Windy City came from entire-home rentals from October 2015 to September 2016, according to the study, compared with 81% nationally.

But, Airbnb’s Breit tells Marotti: “As the AHLA already knows, many of their member inns, motels and hotels list rooms on our platform, so these are included in the very data on 'commercial' listings the big hotels seem so concerned about.” 

“Airbnb hides behind people who are renting an extra room from time to time. But the true nature of its business is to encourage people to convert units to full-time tourist accommodations,” Dale Carlson, a spokesman for anti-Airbnb group Share Better SF, and a consultant and lobbyist for the hotel trade group and a hotel workers’ union, tells the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Said.

Airbnb responded that “93.5% of the entire homes in San Francisco are from hosts with just one listing,” Said writes, and it “provided the Chronicle with a seven-page report showing that in the 12 months that ended Feb. 1, it removed 923 San Francisco listings offered by hosts with multiple listings.”

“Leigh Gallagher, author of The Airbnb Story, recently told LinkedIn that Airbnb and the hospitality industry go to great lengths to say they don’t compete with each other, but that's increasingly becoming a harder case to make,” Ashley Peterson writes for LinkedIn Pulse. “It's especially notable when looking at compression nights — those evenings when hotels raise their prices due to big events that increase demand, such as conferences. These are big ticket nights for hotels, and they're becoming less common.”

Meanwhile, the latest infusion of capital puts Airbnb’s valuation “roughly equivalent to hotel giant Marriott International,” Brian Solomon writes for Forbes. 

“Recently, Airbnb has decided to use its billions in venture capital funding to start making investments and acquisitions of its own, He reports. “… Airbnb also has big plans to invest in growth around the world, especially in China. It is launching new features that expand its offerings, including ‘Trips’ and ‘Experience’ that allow vacationers to book unique activities through Airbnb's platform.”

Now operating in more than 65,000 cities worldwide, “the company turned in a profit on an EBITDA basis in the second half of 2016 and expects to continue to be profitable this year,” a source tells Reuters’ Anya George Tharakan and Rishika Sadam, “adding that Airbnb had no plans to go public anytime soon.”