Airbnb listed on the Stock Exchange yesterday in a massive IPO, where they initially listed at $68 and ended the day at $144.71. It is a technology driven company that I believe is going to succeed, so I will certainly be investing in it, although not necessarily immediately – I am hoping the price will settle down a bit lower than that! I think a lot of people think that Airbnb is a company where people rent out a spare room in their house, but a lot of people have taken it much further than that and have multiple units now and run it as a full-time business. I even know one particular person who rents properties from landlords and then leases them out on Airbnb with the landlord’s permission. So, he pays a certain amount a month and then marks it up and has a manager who runs around and make sure that everything is clean and good. So many of these businesses are all based on the same premise in many ways just cutting out the middleman, although you could argue in this case that the middle man are hotels. Have any of you used Airbnb and if so, have your experiences been positive or not? Here is a fun fact – Airbnb has 4 million hosts!
|