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- Phoenix Airbnb hosts were expecting to be fully booked over Super Bowl weekend.
- A manager of 95 properties said he's half-booked and has cut one nightly price to $500 from $1,200.
- Some US spots are experiencing a glut of short-term rentals that can hurt hosts' booking calendars.
It should've been the busiest weekend in years for Phoenix's Airbnb hosts.
But short-term-rental owners are scrambling to fill empty units with out-of-town revelers ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Months ago, Ric Kenworthy, who manages 95 properties in the Phoenix area through his company Old Town Rental, anticipated they'd all be rented out ahead of the big game. Now, two days before kickoff, occupancy sits at just 45%.
For a prime three-bedroom, two-bathroom home that Kenworthy manages in Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix that prepped for a wave of Super Bowl visitors, Kenworthy initially thought he could fetch $1,200 a night with a five-night minimum. He's cut the rate to $500 a night with a two-night minimum — and it's still not booked.
"It's mind-boggling at this point," Kenworthy told Insider.
The Super Bowl letdown comes as hosts in some areas complain that bookings have slowed, Twitter users chatter about an "Airbnbust," and market data suggests the increasing number of Airbnbs in the US has outpaced increases in traveler demand. Some hosts are responding by switching to medium- or long-term rentals or prioritizing direct bookings. The analytics site AirDNA has predicted that revenue will drop slightly for hosts across the country in 2023 compared with previous years.
According to AirDNA, as of Thursday only 52% of available Phoenix rentals were booked. The site found that two recent Super Bowl host cities, Los Angeles and Miami, had over 80% of their available short-term rentals booked for their game weekends. A New York Times headline described Phoenix's Super Bowl short-term-rental market as a "fumble."
It's a signal not of a lack of travelers but of oversupply. Thousands of people are expected to descend on Phoenix ahead of the Super Bowl, but visitors have more rentals to choose from than ever before. AirDNA found that from February 2017 to January 2023, Airbnb and VRBO listings in Phoenix more than quadrupled, growing to 21,000 from 5,000. A request for comment from Airbnb was not immediately returned on Friday.
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There are even signs of a recent surge in listings in response to the Super Bowl hype.
Kenworthy said an Airbnb representative told him that over 2,200 new listings came online in the past two months, which Kenworthy speculated stemmed mostly from locals who don't typically rent their spaces but were looking to "ride the wave" of the weekend.
Brian Harvey, a director at Rate Simple Mortgage who lends to and mentors short-term-rental investors in Phoenix, said his clients had faced similar bookings slowdowns.
One of them, he said, has a three-bedroom, two-bathroom unit close to much of the weekend's festivities. Guests initially booked it for $925 a night, but they canceled this week, saying they'd found a cheaper deal nearby. Now the house costs just $300 a night, and it's still available.
An Airbnb spokesman told the Arizona Republic that the last time Phoenix hosted the Super Bowl, in 2015, Airbnb hosts in the area collectively earned more than $1.1 million over that weekend. Harvey said many locals were eager to get in on the action this time.
In November, Harvey said, one of his clients bought a 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom home about 10 miles from the stadium for $388,000. The client had anticipated he'd be renting it out for $1,000 a night, but it's sitting empty this weekend.
While Phoenix will continue to be a popular vacation spot, Harvey predicted that the Super Bowl disappointment would motivate some owners to sell their short-term-rental properties.
"We'll see some of these people exit," he told Insider. "I'm sure of it."