Since the creation of Airbnb in 2008, the platform has become viral and the number of listings on
it keep growing years after year. Numerous are people who are accusing the platform to
participate to the housing crisis by increasing both long-term rental prices and houses’ prices in
general.
Therefore, the paper investigates on the research question on how Airbnb impacts the residential
markets, notably by analyzing its effect on long-term rental prices and housing transaction
prices. The analysis will focus on two French cities, Paris and Lyon to see if the results follow
the same trend in both cities or if any differences can be outlined. After looking into previous
research that looked into this question (i.e., literature review conduction), a quantitative study
was conducted using data regression models. The dataset contains respectively 200 and 90 total
observations for Paris and Lyon, over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024.
The results from the regression showed that Airbnb penetration rate has a positive correlation
with long-term rental prices in both Paris and Lyon. However, a different pattern is observed for
the transaction prices. Indeed, while Airbnb penetration rate is positively correlated with housing
transaction prices in Paris, there is a negative relationship in Lyon.
Even though, this paper has some limitations, notably a limited number of variables that were
taken into account, with macroeconomics variables not being integrated in the model, the study
open the door to areas of research that could help improving the overall findings.
