Following a report this week by the New York City comptroller that found Airbnb’s presence had significantly increased rents in the city, the company whose data formed the basis for the study on Friday condemned the findings. The report used data scraped by AirDNA, an unaffiliated company that collects and analyzes data from Airbnb listings. But an AirDNA spokeswoman said that the report by the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, came to “flawed conclusions,” and that Airbnb had no material impact on city rents. “At no point did the comptroller contact AirDNA to ask for guidance or our professional expertise on how to read the data, leading to several crucial errors in his interpretation of the numbers,” Abigail Long, the spokeswoman, said in a statement. Sascha Owen, a spokeswoman for the comptroller, stood by the report’s conclusions, saying it “took an empirical, data-driven approach to assessing this Airbnb effect and shared it with the public.”

Source: New York Times May 05, 2018 00:06 UTC