Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa October 2015 | Page 16

COVER STORY

Airbnb

Accomodation through the economy of sharing
BY DREW HOOK

I

f Uber is unique in being a taxi service that owns
no cars, and Facebook a sharing site that creates
no content, then Airbnb is remarkable for being
the largest accommodation site in the world
without owning any property. Since its inception in
2008 the company, an online marketplace for people to
list, discover and book unique accommodation around
the world using the web or mobile phones, has grown
in an unprecedented way, with listings spreading across
the global village. The company officially launched in
South Africa this year, overseeing local listings while
outlining plans to move upwards throughout the rest
of the continent.
Beginnings
Airbnb was born in 2007 when Joe Gebbia and Brian
Chesky, both Rhode Island School of Design alumni,
decided to rent out three airbeds on their living room
floor during a design conference being held in San
Francisco (as the cities hotels were all fully booked).
They charged each guest $80 per night and cooked

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OCTOBER 2015 SA Real Estate Investor

them breakfast each morning, launching the service on
a site called airbedandbreakfast.com. After successfully
renting out all three beds, and receiving numerous
requests for the service in other locations around the
world, Gebbia and Chesky began targeting conferences
and festivals across America with the aim of getting
local’s to list their rooms for travellers to book.
They enlisted Gebbia’s former flatmate, Nathan
Blecharczyk, a computer science graduate, to develop
the website and began coordinating the launch of the
company around the Democratic National Convention
of 2008 to capitalise on the lack of accommodation.
Seven years later (and now calling itself Airbnb) the
company boasts over 40 million guests, 1500,000
listed properties worldwide, and a total valuation of
$24B. The last year has seen the site grow by 400% and
Airbnb expects to maintain a similar growth rate over
the next twelve months.
Shaking the Establishment
The success of Airbnb lies in it’s timing. The company
www.reimag.co.za