Official vacancy rates are totally skewed by short-term rentals that sit empty 88% of the time.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Invisible Vacancies: How Short-Term Rentals Distort Housing Market Measurement
SSRN · 6382819
The Takeaway
Traditional metrics suggest low vacancy means high demand for housing, but this paper shows that Airbnb and VRBO create 'invisible' vacancies. Because these units are technically 'occupied' by the STR market but physically empty most of the time, they are breaking the tools we use to measure housing availability and affordability.
From the abstract
The presence of low vacancy rates indicates a robust residential housing market characterized by high demand, occupancy, and prices. The proliferation of short-term rentals (STRs) contributes to this trend and exacerbates the reduction of available residential housing stock. A systematic disparity exists between the Census Bureau's definitions of vacant units and the actual status of units listed on home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO. This paper proposes a corrected methodology for g