Tony Wang11 min readThe UK Airbnb Market: London's Listings Never Grow Up
We counted 354,460 UK Airbnb listings. Half of London's have under 10 reviews and just 1.7% reach 200+ — Edinburgh, far smaller, has 10× the mature supply.
Ask what the UK Airbnb market looks like and you'll get one of two answers: a regulatory story about London's 90-day cap, or a modelled estimate of what hosts earn. Neither tells you how the market is actually built — how many listings there are, who holds them, and whether they last. So we counted: 354,460 distinct UK Airbnb listings, observed logged-out, published as market rollups.
The finding that surprised us isn't about price. It's that London's Airbnb supply is structurally incapable of ageing.
The UK holds 354,460 listings, and England holds most of them
| Nation | Listings | Share of geo-resolved |
|---|---|---|
| England | 163,226 | 82.2% |
| Scotland | 17,683 | 8.9% |
| Wales | 14,805 | 7.5% |
| Northern Ireland | 2,894 | 1.5% |
Scotland's 17,683 listings against Wales's 14,805 is closer than population would predict — Wales has roughly half Scotland's people. But the national split isn't where the interesting variance lives. It's inside the cities.
London's listings never accumulate a track record
Review count is the closest thing to a listing's age that public data gives you. A listing with 200+ reviews has been operating, consistently, for years. One with fewer than 10 either launched recently or never books enough to matter. Plotting that distribution across markets produces the sharpest chart in this study:
An ordered maturity axis, not a timeline — each point is a share of that market's rated listings falling in that review band.
49.4% of London's rated listings have fewer than 10 reviews. That is roughly double the US rate (25.6%) and half again the UK's own average (33.2%). At the other end, only 1.7% of London listings reach 200+ reviews — against 7.6% in the US and 16.2% in Edinburgh.
Put plainly: for every London listing that becomes an established business, Edinburgh has nearly ten, out of a market with one-thirteenth the listings. London runs 18,677 listings to Edinburgh's 1,469, and yet Edinburgh has 196 listings at 200+ reviews against London's 220. The two cities are almost level on mature supply in absolute terms.
The Superhost rate tells the same story from another angle. Superhost status requires a sustained booking and rating history, so it is a maturity proxy by construction — and London posts 9.3%, the lowest of any major UK market, against Edinburgh's 18.4% and Oxford's 20.2%.
The 4.00★ trap, and why we're showing it
London's average rating is 4.00★ against a UK average of 4.53★, and 16.9% of its rated listings sit below 3★ versus 4.9% in the US. That is a tempting headline — London's Airbnb quality has collapsed — and it is wrong.
The distribution gives it away. London's rating bands are bimodal: 2,188 listings below 3★ but only 677 in the 3–4★ band. Real quality distributions don't have a hole in the middle. Re-run the same query requiring 5 or more reviews and the sub-3★ bucket doesn't shrink — it vanishes entirely:
| Rating band | All rated listings | 5+ reviews only |
|---|---|---|
| Under 3★ | 2,188 | 0 |
| 3–4★ | 677 | 346 |
| 4–4.5★ | 2,402 | 1,956 |
| 4.5–4.8★ | 3,593 | 3,162 |
| 4.8★+ | 4,124 | 3,112 |
| Total | 12,984 | 8,576 |
Every sub-3★ listing in London is a listing with fewer than five reviews, where one bad night defines the score forever. London's rating average isn't measuring quality; it's measuring the same churn the review-band chart shows, refracted through a different field. Among listings with a real track record, 73.2% sit at 4.5★ or above.
We're spending a section on a finding we didn't publish because this is exactly where short-term-rental data goes wrong. The naive read was available in one query, it was dramatic, and it would have been repeated. The check that killed it took two minutes.
Two capped cities, opposite outcomes
London and New York both restrict short-term lets, and both are held up as the cautionary tale for the other side of whichever argument is being had. The data says they produced structurally different markets:
| Metric | London | New York |
|---|---|---|
| Listings (labelled subset) | 18,677 | 3,600 |
| Under 10 reviews | 49.4% | 23.9% |
| 200+ reviews | 1.7% | 9.7% |
| Superhost rate | 9.3% | 15.3% |
| Average reviews per listing | 27.5 | 83.0 |
| Median list price | $248 | $193 |
New York's Local Law 18 effectively removed casual hosting: what's left is a small market of 3,600 listings that clears the rules, and it looks mature — 9.7% at 200+ reviews, 83 reviews per listing on average, a higher Superhost rate than London despite being a fifth the size. London's 90-day cap does something else entirely. It doesn't remove listings; it prevents any one of them from operating enough nights to build a history. Supply stays high and permanently juvenile. A cap on nights and a cap on operators are not the same policy, and the review distribution is where the difference shows up.
We're describing structure, not grading the policies. Which outcome a city wants is a political question, and a market of few durable operators isn't self-evidently better than one of many casual ones. But a council choosing between the two instruments should know they don't produce the same market.
Edinburgh is the UK's most expensive Airbnb market
Not London — Edinburgh, at a $433 median list price against London's $248. It is a festival city with severe seasonal peaks, and a list-price median captures asking prices across the year including August, so read it as pricing power rather than what a typical night costs. Still, the ranking is not what most people would guess:
Show the full 17-market UK table (listings, median price, Superhost rate, rating)
| Market | Listings | Median list price | Superhost | Avg rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | 18,677 | $248.39 | 9.3% | 4.00★ |
| Liverpool | 2,486 | $153.55 | 10.5% | 4.13★ |
| Birmingham | 1,678 | $143.98 | 11.1% | 4.14★ |
| Manchester | 1,574 | $153.54 | 10.0% | 4.19★ |
| Edinburgh | 1,469 | $433.05 | 18.4% | 4.48★ |
| Leeds | 1,105 | $141.53 | 13.5% | 4.27★ |
| Bath | 1,028 | $189.43 | 13.6% | 4.48★ |
| Newcastle | 723 | $136.49 | 10.1% | 4.13★ |
| Cardiff | 717 | $230.10 | 11.2% | 4.48★ |
| York | 683 | $260.40 | 10.4% | 4.42★ |
| Brighton | 577 | $252.35 | 9.2% | 4.25★ |
| Oxford | 471 | $188.71 | 20.2% | 4.37★ |
| Bristol | 390 | $184.73 | 11.0% | 4.47★ |
| Glasgow | 183 | — | 7.7% | 4.32★ |
| Cambridge | 165 | $112.16 | 7.9% | 3.76★ |
| Inverness | 153 | — | 7.8% | 4.32★ |
| Belfast | 80 | $186.79 | 5.0% | 4.27★ |
The northern English cities cluster tightly and cheaply — Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle all sit between $136 and $154 with Superhost rates of 10–13.5%. The premium markets are the tourist-constrained ones: Edinburgh, York ($260), Brighton ($252), Cardiff ($230). Oxford is the quiet outlier, posting the UK's second-highest Superhost rate (20.2%) on just 471 listings — a small market of operators who stay.
What this means if you work on UK short-term rentals
For policymakers, the London–New York contrast is the usable finding: a nights cap and an operator cap produce different markets, and review distribution is a cheap public way to tell which one you've built. If your goal was to shrink supply, London's 18,677 standing listings say the cap didn't do that.
For investors and operators, London's structure is the risk and the opportunity in one number. A market where 1.7% of listings reach 200+ reviews is a market where an operator who can build a track record faces very little established competition — but the reason the number is 1.7% is a constraint that applies to you too.
For researchers and journalists, the 4.00★ trap is the transferable lesson. Airbnb rating averages are dominated by low-review listings, and any market with high churn will look like a quality problem when it has a maturity problem. Always re-run with a review-count floor.
Everything here is queryable — the same rollups, the same filters, no modelling in between. The Airbnb Markets dataset exposes country, market, admin1, review bands and rating bands over one REST API. If you think we've read this wrong, the query that would prove it is one call away.
Query the UK Airbnb market yourself
354,460 UK listings, 7.85M worldwide — supply, prices, ratings, review bands and Superhost rates as aggregate market rollups over one REST API. 2,000 free credits a month.
Frequently asked questions
How many Airbnb listings are there in the UK?
354,460 distinct Airbnb listings, held by 46,319 identified hosts, in Crawlora's July 2026 logged-out census of public listings. Of the 198,608 that resolve to a nation, England holds 163,226 (82.2%), Scotland 17,683 (8.9%), Wales 14,805 (7.5%) and Northern Ireland 2,894 (1.5%).
Why do so few London Airbnb listings have many reviews?
49.4% of London's rated listings carry fewer than 10 reviews and only 1.7% reach 200+, against 25.6% and 7.6% in the United States. London's 90-day letting cap limits how many nights any single listing can operate, so listings rarely accumulate the booking history needed to build a long review record — supply stays high but structurally young.
Is London's 4.00 star average rating evidence of poor quality?
No. London's rating distribution is bimodal — 2,188 listings below 3★ but only 677 in the 3–4★ band — which is the signature of an artifact rather than a real quality spread. Requiring 5 or more reviews removes the entire sub-3★ population, because those listings are ones where a single poor review sets the average. Among London listings with a real track record, 73.2% sit at 4.5★ or above.
Which UK city has the most expensive Airbnb listings?
Edinburgh, at a $433 median list price — well above London's $248. Edinburgh is a festival city with severe seasonal peaks, and a list-price median spans the whole year including August, so it reflects pricing power rather than a typical night's cost. York ($260), Brighton ($252) and Cardiff ($230) follow.
How do London and New York compare as regulated Airbnb markets?
They restrict short-term lets in different ways and produced different markets. New York's Local Law 18 culled supply to 3,600 labelled listings but left a mature market — 9.7% at 200+ reviews, 83 reviews per listing, a 15.3% Superhost rate. London's 90-day cap left 18,677 listings standing but only 1.7% reach 200+ reviews, with a 9.3% Superhost rate. A cap on nights and a cap on operators are not the same policy.
Does this data include Airbnb occupancy or revenue for UK markets?
No. Crawlora publishes supply-side data only — listings, list prices, ratings, review counts, Superhost status and host concentration. Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR require booking data that isn't publicly observable, so any such figure is a model estimate rather than a measurement.