Seasonality of Short Term Rentals: Case Study from Airbnb in Istanbul

The short-term rental market has grown rapidly over the last decade. Airbnb (and other online accommodation sharing platforms, which provide an online market that links people with each other as host and guest system) is attracting much interest, as it has implications for the real estate market worldwide. The impacts vary across the globe depending on the context. As Airbnb comes at the forefront of short rentals platforms in this market in Istanbul, Turkey Airbnb has the biggest share, which attracted many researchers trying to answer the generated and raised questions. Using scrapped data from Airbnb websites, this paper offers insights into Airbnb usage patterns and how they vary across different districts of Istanbul with different types of provided properties and how they correlate with asked prices. Seasonality has a significant effect in the real estate market as it directly affects supply and demand, so We used the number of reviews variable in the dataset as an indicator of the demand to study the seasonality pattern and how prices fluctuate over time to different reasons. The paper also explored the asked rent prices in the long-term leases using data from Emlak 360 and Endeksa websites and compared it to short-term rentals. This is continuing research that provides a map for the Istanbul dataset that will inspire and establish new aspects to academics and professionals in the Turkish market to further analyze how the market acts at certain times.