ATL Neighbors

Impact Study

Overview

ATL Neighbors assessed the location of thousands of listings on Airbnb.com to determine the impact of policy proposals such as the ATL Neighbors STR Policy proposal. The findings are available for the city as a whole and for each Neighborhood, Neighborhood Planning Unit and City Council District. A list of things to keep in mind about this study are as follows:

• These results discriminate between Un-Hosted Primary Residence STRs and Short Term Vacation Rentals based on the maximum number of nights available. If the listing is an Entire Unit and is available for more than half the year it is treated as a Short Term Vacation Rental (STVR). If the listing is an Entire Unit and is available for less than half a year it is treated as an Unhosted Primary Residence STR.
• A key aspect of the ATL Neighbors policy proposal is to cap and distribute the STVRs equitably across the city by allowing two STVRs per land lot.
• The ATL Neighbors policy proposal caps the number of days STVRs can be rented, but that is not addressed in the impact study because we do not have occupancy information in the source dataset.
• We collected data during the first half of September 2020 from airbnb.com.
• Airbnb.com only publishes an approximate location for its listings, so any study based on this data is also approximate.
• Airbnb.com limits the number of listings it displays, so it is likely there are more listings than we found in our study.
• There are many other Short Term Rental platforms that were not included in this study. This means there are likely many additional listings that are not included in our study.
• This analysis defines Short Term Rentals to be 30 days or less to match Z-20-69. Listings that require stays 31 days or longer are not included in the analysis.
• The totals in this study are different than in the Z-20-69 study because the ATL Neighbors proposal does not limit Homestays, whereas Z-20-69 does limit them.
• Because Neighborhood, NPU and City Council districts do not follow land lot boundaries, this study counts the land lots in each geospatial area it intersects.
• Use this study as a general guide and for trends. We feel that while the exact numbers may be off, the proportion of listings in one location versus another are likely to remain fairly consistent.

Data Transparency

The raw Airbnb listing data from the first half of September is available here. You can use Excel to search, find and filter the data of interest to you.

One issue we noticed with Atlanta's geospatial maps is that there are three duplicate land lots. We chose to leave the duplicate land lots in for this analysis, but that inflates the potential total number of STVR permits by six. The duplicated land lots are 15-173, 15-237 and 18-56.

Use the City of Atlanta's interactive map to locate and visualize land lots. Use the ATL Neighbors September 2020 STR Map to locate and visualize STR locations.

Existing Conditions