How to become an Airbnb super host in Seattle

July 17, 2018

Last month, mom and dad visited me in Seattle and I need to find a welcoming and cozy place for them to stay. I'm glad that I let them try Airbnb. Thanks to Eric's hospitable hosting, my parents enjoyed their stay and felt like at home.

Actually, Eric is one of the "super hosts" granted by Airbnb in Seattle. There's a "super host" badge on his profile that identifies him as a reliable host provides extraordinary experiences for guests. Airbnb hopes the hosts with the badge could provide a shining example for the other hosts.

This made me become curious about how many super hosts like Eric are there in Seattle. I found a dataset that describes the recent listing activity of Airbnb hosts in the city and created the diagram above, which gave me a glance of the super host listings in Seattle. There are 705 listings belonging to 477 super hosts in Seattle. Those listings locate across the city with most of which are "entire home/apt" room types. In addition, what can be noticed is that most of those listings are no more than 200 dollars a night.

Some neighborhoods where the Airbnb listings are located were not identified in the dataset, and they were marked as "other neighborhoods". Among those identified neighborhoods, downtown has the most number of super host listings, with Central area in second place. However, the Northgate neighborhood has the highest percentage of super host listings. As one who lives in U-district, I'm very surprised to see that U-district has such a low amount and percentage of super host listings.

After the first look at the data, I decided to run a logistic regression for the super host classification. I considered the following variables as the predictors in the regression: host response time, response rate, neighborhood, property type, room type, bedrooms, cancellation policy, and length of becoming an Airbnb host. The regression result shows that:

A quicker response time and a stricter cancelation policy would lead to a higher probability of becoming a super host.
Properties in University District neighborhood decreases a host's chance to become a super host.
Hosts with a cabin type property have a better chance than those with an apartment type to become a super host.
Hosts with a shared room type are significantly less possible to become a super host than those with home/apt.
The host's length of joining Airbnb doesn't play an important role in effecting whether the host would become a super host.
Surprisingly, more bedrooms in the property tend to decrease the host's probability of becoming a super host. This might be a lurking variable. More bedroom properties might be less affordable and this might harm the popularity of the Airbnb property.

Even though Airbnb has listed the requirements of becoming a super host on their website, some of their requirements like "Received a 5-star review at least 80% of the time" are ambiguous for hosts to meet. My recommendations here like avoiding University District area or setting a reasonable price might be more straightforward and easy to follow.

Lastly, let's end this article with a word cloud about the Airbnb hosts in Seattle. It summarizes the most frequent words in the host description column. Thank you for reading!

For the data cleaning, text mining and modeling process, please click here.