When Scott Shatford got laid off as a data consultant in October of 2012, he chose to look at the moment as an opportunity, not a loss. He made plans to travel around Southeast Asia for six months, touching down in places like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Bali.
His neighbor at the time suggested that he put his Santa Monica house up on Airbnb to make some extra cash while he travelled.
“So I figured out how to do this whole vacation rental thing, and it was pretty much the easiest money I could make,” Shatford said.
When Shatford was abroad, managing reservations and interested tourists, he soon had an “a-ha” moment, when he realized he could make a living off of renting his place out. In 2013, he began growing his own rental business.
"But now, I have people coming up to me thanking me for leading the way and understanding the market to get into the business.”
As he began to understand the market, however, he decided to skip the usual path of people trying to make money off of short-term rentals, which was typically to buy 1,000 properties, put them on Airbnb and make money. Instead, he decided that he wanted to translate his comfort with data and business analytics into a tool, one that could empower others to make an initial plunge into money making through Airbnb property management.
Thus in 2015, AirDNA was born. It's a Denver-based startup that helps short-term rental hosts analyze the best prices for their property, demand trends and performance — with a wide scope. In fact, AirDNA tracks and analyzes over 10 million short-term rentals, making about $5 million in revenue.
AirDNA has two types of typical customers. There are the Airbnb owners who want to better optimize their properties, and then there are investment firms that are interested in tourism and real estate trends.
For example: If you’re an Airbnb owner of a property in New Orleans and it's Mardi Gras, you can tap into AirDNA-supplied historical data to know what rates your neighbors put their places up for during that busy week. That way, even if you’re the new kid on the block, you’ll be able to meet (and even beat) the competition while optimizing your profits. On the flip side, if you’re a commercial real estate company, you can see indicating which areas are attracting the most tourists.
“Someone [on Airbnb] as a hobby isn’t trying to nerd out on the data for this,” said Shatford. “Typically, our customers are people trying to do this as a full-time business.”
When Shatford started the company just to promote entrepreneurship in the short-term rental community, he had no idea how explosive the trend would become. At first, he had the normal fears of starting a business — that his goal wasn’t impactful enough or that his target customer base wasn’t big enough.
But now, according to CNBC.com, Airbnb is now worth about $31 billion, making it the second-most valuable startup in the U.S.
“We feel like we’ve been a big catalyst in this growth,” he said. “People weren’t going to take that first plunge saying, 'I want to start an Airbnb and a company.' But now, I have people coming up to me thanking me for leading the way and understanding the market to get into the business.”
And, while AirDNA's name does perhaps evoke thoughts of Airbnb's, AirDNA Head of Product Eric Rosenfeld said the company doesn’t work directly with Airbnb. He added that while “every startup aims to be important to another startup,” AirDNA leadership are not looking to have the company acquired.
“We’re focused on being an independent source of data for [Airbnb users],” said Rosenfeld. “Our information we provide is not available for them, but our data supports their story.”
