Purpose Short-term rentals are mainly of small flats, which are offered to tourists. Currently, the providers of short-term rentals, in particular Airbnb (ABB), are being criticized in several German cities, on the grounds that shares of residential flats are being removed from the housing market, due to illegitimate misuse as tourist accommodation. Thus, the conventional urban housing markets are contending with a decline in housing supply and increasing rents. This paper aims to support these findings empirically. Design/methodology/approach The paper opted first for a spatial analysis with ArcGIS for ABB in Berlin. Second, different online data requests of periods of up to two months were used to analyze the extent of misuse with regard to the Zweckentfremdungsverbot (misuse prohibition law). Third, analysis of variance was used to analyze rental growth on the ABB markets. The data were collected in different approaches from the website of airbnb.com. Findings The paper provides evidence that 5,555 residential flats are presently being misused by ABB (0.30 per cent of the total housing stock in Berlin) and that many providers of entire flats have more than one offer simultaneously. Moreover, the paper provides the first entire-market overview of ABB in Berlin. It is evident that the ABB market is mainly located centrally and that only a few neighborhoods have large ABB markets. Rental growth is higher in the ABB markets which have a significant share of misused flats, than in the ABB markets which have insignificant shares of misused flats. Originality/value To the authors’ best knowledge, the paper provides the first empirical approach regarding misuse through short-term rentals on a housing market with an innovative design and first-hand data.

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Purpose This study aims to analyze whether urban tourism affects Berlin housing rents. Urban tourism is of considerable economic importance for many urban destinations and has developed very strongly over the past few years. The prevailing view is that urban tourism triggers side-effects, which affect the urban housing markets through a lack of supply and increasing rents. Berlin represents Germany’s largest rental market and is particularly affected by growing urban tourism and increasing rents. Design/methodology/approach The paper considers whether urban tourism hotspots affect Berlin’s housing rents, using two hedonic regression approaches, namely, conventional ordinary least squares (OLS) and generalized additive models (GAM). The regression models incorporate housing characteristics as well as several distance-based measures. The research considers tourist attractions, restaurants, hotels and holiday flats as constituents of tourism hotspots and is based on a spatial analysis using geographic information systems (GIS). Findings The results can be regarded as a preliminary indication that rents are, indeed, affected by urban tourism. Rents seem to be positively correlated with the touristic attractiveness of a particular location, even if it is very difficult to accurately measure the real quantity of the respective effects of the urban tourism amenities, as the various models show. GAM outperforms the results of OLS and seems to be more appropriate for spatial analysis of rents across a city. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper provides the first empirical analysis of the effects of urban tourism hotspots on the Berlin housing market.

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