AIRBNB FOR
REAL ESTATE
NURTURING NEW HOSTS
Airbnb has been experiencing greater headwinds to growth for its core host segment due to market saturation, local restrictions, and host operating costs.
/ CONTEXT + PROBLEM
Over the last 5 years, there has been a shift towards more listings managed by professional hosts. Growth of its core host segment (owner-occupied single family homes) has stagnated due to regulation, market saturation, and cost pressures. Airbnb needs to diversify its host groups to help satisfy the types of demand for its product and help navigate the regulatory pressures being applied.
An estimated 50% of listings on Airbnb are now managed by professional hosts, with core host growth on the Airbnb marketplace beginning to reach maturity.
Airbnb has never offered renters the opportunity to host. With an estimated 23 million apartment units in the US, there was a sizable opportunity to help people discover their next apartment, and host on Airbnb.
But Airbnb had an awareness and discoverability problem with prospective renters. Most people don't think about Airbnb when looking for their next place to rent. They search on other marketplaces or directly on a building's website.
/ CHALLENGES
There were several challenges to create awareness and engagement on Airbnb to help people find their next apartment and ultimately enroll to become a host. We didn't have a prominent place in the Airbnb search experience and people couldn't search for an apartment from the homepage. We also weren't overtly discoverable on building websites that supported Airbnb-friendly Apartments. Our primary tools of engagement were through SEO or direct linking from a building page to our product marketing page or marketplace.
LIMITED EXPOSURE ON THE AIRBNB HOMEPAGE
There is no mention of renting an apartment on Airbnb.com when conducting a search or the ability to become a host. The only mention of the Airbnb-friendly Apartments program is in the footer.

The primary reason being - this is not a direct source of revenue. We need to be able to use this program as an incentive to get residents into buildings, and then enroll as hosts on Airbnb.
PRIORITIZATION ON PARTNER WEBSITES
We rely on the buildings we partner with to help promote the program, and reinforce the incentive to become a host on Airbnb as a resident.

On many partner websites, it is difficult to find information about the program, if at all.

In this example for Argenta Apartments in San Francisco, the content isn't discoverable unless you scroll to the bottom of the landing page.
SMALL SAMPLE SIZE OF USERS
Our sample size was extremely small compared to the typical traveler using Airbnb to book accomodations. Most people weren't even aware that this was an option. A typical search needs a nuanced level of specificity to product a result (as shown).

Most of our attributable user base were people that already lived in building that were partnering with us, or those that happened to learn about the program while reaching out to or visiting a building. This also made it difficult to gather significant data about our potential users.
/ CORE TOUCHPOINTS
The Airbnb-friendly Apartments program has 4 core touchpoints to build awareness and convert hosts. These pages all live within the Airbnb ecosystem, but are not promoted similar to other Airbnb products and services. They are the foundation of our customer funnel and it is critical for us to find creative ways to drive traffic to these pages.
Each of these pages play an important role in our program, and we tested various experiments on each to try and drive conversion (see sections below for more details).
Property Landing Page
A more nuanced product marketing page for a specific building. Many people arrive here through partner building websites or through search engines.
Marketing Landing Page
The primary product marketing page to help people get started. People may land here after doing a general search on their browser or a link from Airbnb.com
Browse Page
This is the consumer marketplace where prospective renters can search for and explore building inventory. They are able to see location data and pricing.
Property Detail Page
This page highlights all of the specific details about a building - including floorplans, unit availability, amenities, and how much a resident can earn as a host.
Marketing Landing Page
The primary product marketing page to help people get started. People may land here after doing a general search on their browser or a link from Airbnb.com
Property Landing Page
A more nuanced product marketing page for a specific building. Many people arrive here through partner building websites or through search engines.
Browse Page
This is the consumer marketplace where prospective renters can search for and explore building inventory. They are able to see location data and pricing.
Property Detail Page
This page highlights all of the specific details about a building - including floorplans, unit availability, amenities, and how much a resident can earn as a host.
For 2025, our goal was to add an additional 4,700 new active listings - leading to a total of 6,800
/ RESEARCH
We planned and executed both quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews to help inform our strategy for engagement and building new awareness for the program. This was complementary to the growth experiments that we were running as well. This research allowed us to quickly iterate with a higher level of confidence and refined the types of growth experiments that may be the most impactful - or provide the greatest opportunity for learning and capturing more data.
This is one example of a survey we conducted with 19 participants to better understand how building residents think about hosting guests for longer stays (28 nights or more). This is a critical demographic, as many local regulations restrict short-term stays.
Long-term stays provide greater stability
"I would tell them that hosting long-term stays provides stability, reduces the stress of frequent guest turnover, and ensures more consistent income.”
Residents choose to live or spend significant time elsewhere
“I work remotely and used the flexibility to travel while rent was covered for my lease through my Airbnb-friendly apartment.”
Show Research Report
/ GROWTH EXPERIMENTS
We leveraged multiple product marketing pages in addition to our default marketplace and property detail pages to educate high intent users that have indicated interest in a building as a prospective renter. These became a testing ground for us to iterate quickly and identify meaningful impact (both positive and negative) on the way people engaged with our product. Some of the highlights include SEO optimization, content exploration, and placement of incentives.
SEO OPTIMIZATION
We focused on SEO improvements to drive engagment due to resource constraints and difficulty promoting our product to the typical Airbnb visitor. We had to be creative and find multiple touchpoints and levers to help drive more traffic to our site.
- Additional content was added to our marketplace landing page and property detail pages to help nurture prospective renters searching for an apartment.
- We expanded the number of FAQs on our product marketing pages, and refined the content to better address the lack of education and knowledge about the program.
- We also ran an experiment to capture visitor questions to gain a better sense of concerns people may have that weren't readily available with the FAQs.
CONTENT MODULES
We ran several experiments and iterated on many designs for different content modules on the Property Landing Page to test engagement and the impact on conversion.
- The "Try Before You Buy" module which highlighted active listings on Airbnb being hosted building residents - and could be booked - had positive metrics.
- The "Building Supports" module that highlighted building amenities that are critical to help resident hosts feel confident and ease any concerns, also had positive metrics. This was also validated through much of the quant/qual research we did.
- We also ran an experiment to capture visitor questions to gain a better sense of concerns people may have that weren't readily available with the FAQs.
Not every experiment we tested was successful though. Many content modules we tested negatively impacted conversion - but it was still critical data to capture.
V1 Hero Module
Our initial header module was very text-heavy with two prominent CTAs. This caught many users off guard as they weren't yet confident to move forward without more program details.
Annualized Earnings
We tried to frame the host earnings opportunity on an annual basis, rather than monthly, to establish a more substantial incentive. This actually eroded trust with users and it felt disingenous.
Program Benefits
We knew educational content was critical to help build trust with prospexctive renters, but pushing too much content to the tip of the page deprioritized our biggest incentive - host earnings potential.
Responsible Hosting Page
Navigating local regulations and registration processes is always the biuggest hurdle for people. We introduced a module to connect people to resources, but the language was so nebulous that it created more confusion.
V1 Hero Module
Our initial header module was very text-heavy with two prominent CTAs. This caught many users off guard as they weren't yet confident to move forward without more program details.
Annualized Earnings
We tried to frame the host earnings opportunity on an annual basis, rather than monthly, to establish a more substantial incentive. This actually eroded trust with users and it felt disingenous.
Program Benefits
We knew educational content was critical to help build trust with prospexctive renters, but pushing too much content to the tip of the page deprioritized our biggest incentive - host earnings potential.
Property Detail Page
This page highlights all of the specific details about a building - including floorplans, unit availability, amenities, and how much a resident can earn as a host.
INCENTIVES
For many buildings, we had backend data on different promotion and incentive programs, but we weren't displaying this information anywhere. We also had our own Airbnb mnarketing initiatives to try and help improve converstion for residents in the building. Both of these incentive programs had positive metric on our conversion.
- Incentives were displayed on our marketplace search page and property detail pages.
- If we knew that a user was already a resident at a building, we displayed the Airbnb marketing incentive. For all prospective residents, we displayed any building promotion.
- We tested many different types of UI treatments including page banners, badge overlays, and inline actions.
/ OUTCOMES & LEARNINGS
The different groth experiments we ran had mixed results in regards to conversion. Some caused statustucally significant drops in click-through rates while others showed a higher probability of people taking the next step in their journey to become a resident or list their apartment on Airbnb. Regardless of the outcome, we were always gathering critical date to inform our product decisions and design execution.
Earnings Calculator Header
There’s no statistically significant difference in our goal metric (CTR on start hosting), but the treatment group performs better directionally, and an increase in engagement with the calculator.
Building Supports
This experiment was successful and led to a 17.9% increase in the odds of users clicking “Start Hosting” for the treatment group post-launch compared to the control group.
Program Benefits
This experiment did not produce favorable results. 'List Your Space' starts fell by 12.5%, New Active Listings dropped by 10%, and earnings calculator interactions saw a significant decline of 15.7%.
Try Before You Buy
There was a statistically significant increase of 1.18% on click-through-rate (CTR) on the contact property button on this page in the treatment group compared to that of control.
Earnings Calculator Header
There’s no statistically significant difference in our goal metric (CTR on start hosting), but the treatment group performs better directionally, and an increase in engagement with the calculator.
Building Supports
This experiment was successful and led to a 17.9% increase in the odds of users clicking “Start Hosting” for the treatment group post-launch compared to the control group.
Program Benefits
This experiment did not produce favorable results. 'List Your Space' starts fell by 12.5%, New Active Listings dropped by 10%, and earnings calculator interactions saw a significant decline of 15.7%.
Try Before You Buy
There was a statistically significant increase of 1.18% on click-through-rate (CTR) on the contact property button on this page in the treatment group compared to that of control.
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