The Effect of Andalucía’s Airbnb Registration Policy

Abstract

[eng] The researcher focuses on two different timestamps in regard to the Decree 28/2016 initiated in 2016 by the Andalusian government aimed at requiring a certain standard for private homeowner to comply with regulation and register their property in the Tourism Register of Andalucía. The researcher focuses on the effect it has on the average listing price of the Apartments and houses listed on Airbnb, the revenue the listings made, the occupation rate of the listings and the overall rating. The researcher applied a Difference-in-Differences analysis over the time span of one year at two different points in time. First, for the shock in May of 2018 where Airbnb communicated that it would enforce the policy by removing all listings not registered with the tourism register until the end of September of 2018 and second, for the shock of Airbnb actually enforcing the legislation. The results obtained show that the shock in May 2018 had a negative impact on prices and revenue, a positive impact on the number of reservations and no impact on overall ratings. For the shock in October 2018, the results show a positive impact for prices, revenue, and the number of reservations while again showing no impact on ratings. Those results are explained with a variety of hypothesis that will require further testing in follow up research for a clear confirmation. However, they allow to evaluate the policy as at least somewhat successful in what it was trying to achieve, although that effect started over two years after the policy was initiated. As a conclusion, the researcher recommends the government of Andalucía to preferably collaborate with the private sector from the policy design stage onwards to prevent such delays between the initiation of a policy and its time of starting to be effective.