Skift Take
The Vietnamese are known for their entrepreneurial spirit. A growth spurt in homesharing listings shows how eagerly they have sought a share of the tourism boom. But yields are falling even as the supply of homes and hotels are continuing to increase. Crunch time is near or perhaps even here.
In 2014 when he founded Christina’s, a homesharing management company in Vietnam, Thu Nguyen said the number of active listings in the country was just around 1,500.
By 2017 this had ballooned to some 33,000 listings. Now it’s about 40,000, estimates Grant Thornton Vietnam, which watches the sector closely as part of its hotel survey.
An explosive growth in listings may be good news for visitors but not for business. Home owners are already seeing yields and prices dropping by 50 percent since 2016, said Nguyen, and the slump will only get worse before it gets better as supply isn’t going to slow.
Currently entire homes have an average occupancy of 47 percent and an average daily rate of $69. For private rooms, it's even less, at 36 percent average occupancy and $31 average daily rate, according to a new report by AirDNA.
AirDNA nevertheless maintains in the report that even with those rates, the homesharing economy is beneficial to hosts. “Even for those making the average [annual] $5,400 salary in urban areas, renting out an entire home could generate enough to live on, plus extra,” said the report.
Robust Listings
Economic prosperity has given Vietnamese the means to buy private apartments as investment. At the same time tourist arrivals keep rising strongly, prodding those with a home or a spare room to assess how they can partake in tourism’s growth.
“In the major cities many owners of residential apartments are listing their properties on Airbnb as they are able to achieve better average daily rates than long-term leases,” observed Kenneth Atkinson, executive chairman, Grant Thornton Vietnam. “There are also people or companies renting apartments to put onto Airbnb where t
