Airbnb launches platform allowing renters to host apartments, partnering with major landlords

Airbnb is partnering with several major landlords and management companies to list designated apartment buildings where renters are allowed to offer short-term sublets on the site.

The company said Wednesday that a new page on its website will list so-called Airbnb-friendly buildings, which will give tenants the option to host their apartments just as homeowners can.

Typically, rental buildings prohibit tenants from subletting for short stays.

To start, Airbnb is showcasing 175 apartment buildings in more than 25 major markets, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Seattle and Phoenix. Some cities, such as New York City and Washington, D.C., are not available due to local restrictions on short-term rentals.

The platform will help tenants host their rentals, and help the buildings attract tenants who may want to host. How much tenants could earn will vary.

“It depends on the building, depends on the location, there are a lot of different assumptions,” Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of Airbnb.

Given how much apartment rents have climbed over the past few years, along with home prices and other rising prices, tenants are increasingly looking for ways to supplement their incomes to make their monthly payments. Rents are starting to ease, but are still up 10% from a year ago, according to Apartment List.

Last year, rents rose more than 15% from the year before.

The new page on Airbnb’s website will also offer a calculator to show how much money the tenant can potentially make per month. The calculation changes depending on the number of bedrooms and the number of nights each building allows, as well as the potential asking rents, given the building’s amenities.

Apartment buildings can also charge the primary tenant a fee of up to 20% of the price of each Airbnb use. For those buildings that have been in test mode so far, Airbnb said tenants have hosted an average of nine nights per month with an average income of $900 per month.

All hosts in the participating buildings must be the primary resident, and the buildings can restrict how many nights per month the apartment can be sublet. That’s generally between 80 and 120 nights per year. The restrictions, which can be enforced since the transactions all take place on the portal, are intended to prevent investors from taking part and subletting the apartments full-time.

The apartment building owner or management company also have the right to review the listings before they go live and deactivate a listing if it does not comply with the building’s standards. They can also mandate a government ID from all potential subletters.

Equity Residential and UDR, which are apartment real estate investment trusts, or REITs, and Greystar, the largest apartment management company in the U.S.,  are among the major names offering apartments with hosting privileges on the new Airbnb platform.

“We believe this platform will provide the right tools for both owners and residents to effectively manage short-term rental activity without impacting overall housing supply,” a Greystar representative said.  “We are collaborating with Airbnb on this innovative approach to participate in the 21^st century sharing economy in a thoughtful way.”  

CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this story.