Airbnb Stats

The Idea

We, Oriol Batalla and Andrea Estalayo, are a curious Engineer and a innovative Interior Architect that were looking to move to a bigger city. We were very happy and excited with that idea. But we realized that the coolest cities also included a extra premium on their rents.

To achieve this objective we considered to offset the rent using Airbnb to rent a spare room on their future apartment. But the lack of statistics made this a risky decision. So minimize this risk, we started to collect data from Airbnb with a simple script. This simple script started to grow and evolved into a complete system capable of crawl regularly almost all room in Airbnb for an entire city.

That is the little story behind how we ended up building Airbnb Stats: a site that can provide some statistics about the current listings, including location of the most profitable areas or daily average revenue per city.

Current Technology

Back-end

• Python brain that runs continuously grabbing data from Airbnb updating the front end every few days.
• MongoDB as a powerhouse to store the data with currently more than 15 Gb and 1M listings so far.
• Proxy libraries and own made lists to avoid Airbnb getting upset 😉
• Microsoft Azure services based 24/7 scraping.