Airbnb partners with landlords to allow tenants to host apartments

In partnership with major property management companies, Airbnb has released a platform that allows tenants to host apartments.

Airbnb is working with some of the biggest landlords and property management companies to make a list of buildings where renters can list short-term sublets on the site.

The company announced on Wednesday that a new page on its website will list buildings that are "Airbnb-friendly." This means that tenants will be able to rent out their apartments just like homeowners.

In most rental buildings, tenants aren't allowed to sublet for short stays.

Airbnb is showing off 175 apartment buildings in more than 25 major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Seattle, and Phoenix. Some cities, like New York City and Washington, D.C., don't have short-term rentals because of the rules in those cities.

The platform will help tenants host their rentals and help buildings find tenants who may want to host. The amount of money a renter could make varies.

Nathan Blecharczyk, one of the people who started Airbnb, said, "It depends on the building, it depends on the location, and there are a lot of different assumptions."

Since apartment rents and home prices have gone up a lot in the past few years and other prices have also gone up, tenants are looking for ways to make more money to pay their monthly bills. Apartment List says that rents are starting to go down, but they are still 10% higher than they were a year ago.

In the past year, rents went up by more than 15%.

On the new page of Airbnb's website, there will also be a calculator that shows how much money the renter could make each month. The calculation changes based on the number of bedrooms and nights each building allows, as well as the potential asking rents based on the building's amenities.

The main tenant of an apartment building can also be charged up to 20% of the price of each Airbnb use. Airbnb said that in the buildings that have been used for testing so far, tenants have rented out their rooms an average of nine nights per month, making an average of $900 per month.

All hosts in the buildings that take part must be the main residents, and the buildings can limit how many nights an apartment can be rented out each month. That's between 80 and 120 nights a year, on average. The rules, which can be enforced because all of the transactions happen on the portal, are meant to stop investors from joining and subletting the apartments full-time.

The apartment building owner or management company can also look at the listings before they go live and remove one if it doesn't meet the building's rules. They can also ask all possible subletters for a government ID.

Equity Residential and UDR are apartment real estate investment trusts (REITs), and Greystar is the largest apartment management company in the U.S. They are among the big names offering apartments with hosting rights on the new Airbnb platform.

A Greystar representative said, "We think this platform will give both owners and renters the tools they need to manage short-term rentals well without affecting the overall housing supply." "We are working with Airbnb on this new way to participate in the sharing economy in a smart way in the 21st century."