The Sharing Economy and Real Estate Market: the Phenomenon of shared houses

During this last decade, new forms of sharing economy have been developed as an alternative tool for the satisfaction of heterogeneous needs. From the both short and long distance transportation to the rental of apartments, this rising economy has created a new private supply for those services that, traditionally, were only provided by professionals. In parallel with its unexpected development, the entity of its impact on the relative traditional economic sectors has grown too. This fact has determined the need, ever more urgent, of studies on the dynamics of this phenomenon. The housing short-term rental sector plays a central role within the universe of the sharing economy. In fact, it has been born a new rental market, parallel to the traditional one, which is characterized by short and very-short-term contracts and by the immediate and eased encounter between demand and supply, made possible through the use of digital platforms. Airbnb plays, without any doubt, a leading role in this phenomenon. Born in the United States, in few years it has had an astonishing global expansion. In fact, currently, it operates in 191 countries, almost homogeneously, that is to say, without trying to match the enormous differences between local legislations on tourism and real estate, to major procedural and systemic differences. This service was born in 2007, but it is only since 2013 that, in Italy, its presence has become massive; until then, only few hundreds of listings were published within the whole nation. Its development has thus been exponential, and as the projections confirm, in all likelihood, in the next decade it will maintain the same rates of growth. By now, it has already been several years that researchers and operators have highlighted the influence of Airbnb in the market of tourist-accommodations. What is still poorly detailed, perhaps because its minor obviousness and immediacy, is the relationship that this kind of short-term rental contracts have with the traditional real estate market. Therefore, this study wants to take a first step towards the comprehension of the impact that the uncontrolled growth of the sharing economy has, specifically, on the Italian real estate market. Logically, the rental submarket is the one that is affected the most by the growth of sharing economy. In fact, compared to traditional rentals, contracts that are stipulated with Airbnb provide lessors with much higher revenues and much lower restrictions. That is one of the reasons that the Airbnb’s user base has had such an enormous expansion. However, this, has also led to the fear that these new dynamics are liable to distort the traditional real estate market.