Tony Wang8 min readWhere Airbnb Has More Listings Than Homes For Sale
We joined Crawlora's Airbnb and Housing datasets by metro. In Gatlinburg, Savannah and Orlando, active Airbnb listings outnumber homes currently for sale.
Every "does Airbnb cause the housing crisis" argument gets made with anecdotes — a viral thread about a neighborhood, a city council hearing, a think-tank report about one metro. Crawlora runs two independent, queryable datasets that between them cover exactly this question at scale: the Airbnb Markets census (7.85M listings, see our supply-map study) and the Housing Markets dataset (17.9M region-months of Redfin data joined to Census income, see our affordability study). We joined them by metro to ask a narrower, more answerable question: where does Airbnb's listing supply actually rival the homes for sale in the same market?
Where Airbnb supply rivals the for-sale market
Across the 16 metros we could cleanly match, three stand out — and they're not the metros you'd guess from a "most expensive housing" list:
Gatlinburg, Tennessee (whose Redfin metro is officially "Sevierville, TN") has 4,077 Airbnb listings against just 2,012 homes for sale — more than two Airbnb listings for every home on the market. Savannah, Georgia isn't far behind at 1.80×, and Orlando — the largest market in this table by far, with 21,712 listings — still clears 1.65× despite its sheer size, against 13,173 homes for sale in the same metro.
Show the full 16-metro table (Airbnb listings, for-sale inventory, ratio, price-to-income)
| Metro | Airbnb listings | Homes for sale | Ratio | Price ÷ income |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gatlinburg, TN (Sevierville, TN metro) | 4,077 | 2,012 | 2.03× | 6.68× |
| Savannah, GA | 5,193 | 2,883 | 1.80× | 4.72× |
| Orlando, FL | 21,712 | 13,173 | 1.65× | 5.56× |
| Honolulu, HI | 3,233 | 3,911 | 0.83× | 7.47× |
| Miami, FL | 10,107 | 15,373 | 0.66× | 7.64× |
| San Jose, CA | 1,461 | 2,332 | 0.63× | 16.24× |
| San Diego, CA | 2,979 | 5,626 | 0.53× | 9.33× |
| Charleston, SC | 2,343 | 6,055 | 0.39× | 6.67× |
| Las Vegas, NV | 3,832 | 10,371 | 0.37× | 5.81× |
| Los Angeles, CA | 3,995 | 17,019 | 0.23× | 9.48× |
| Nashville, TN | 2,648 | 13,618 | 0.19× | 7.00× |
| New York, NY | 3,600 | 23,512 | 0.15× | 9.47× |
| Austin, TX | 2,040 | 15,220 | 0.13× | 5.70× |
| Washington, DC | 1,634 | 14,350 | 0.11× | 5.73× |
| Atlanta, GA | 1,706 | 26,672 | 0.06× | 5.24× |
| Dallas, TX | 1,083 | 24,274 | 0.04× | 5.42× |
Aggregated across all 16 metros: 71,643 Airbnb listings against 196,401 homes for sale — a combined ratio of 0.365, or roughly one Airbnb listing for every three homes on the market in these cities. The three vacation-town outliers pull that average up considerably; drop Gatlinburg, Savannah and Orlando and the remaining 13 metros average well under 0.2×.
STR saturation and housing unaffordability are different problems
If Airbnb saturation were simply "a symptom of expensive housing markets," the metros with the highest price-to-income ratios should also have the highest Airbnb-to-inventory ratios. They don't. San Jose is the single priciest metro we measured — 16.24× the price-to-income affordability benchmark, more than double any other metro in this table — but its Airbnb ratio is a modest 0.63×, below Honolulu and Miami. Across all 16 metros, the correlation between STR ratio and price-to-income is r = -0.12 — statistically indistinguishable from zero, and if anything trending the opposite direction from what an "Airbnb causes unaffordability" thesis would predict.
That makes sense once you look at why Gatlinburg, Savannah and Orlando top the list. None of them are top-of-market by income-to-price standards (all sit at 4.7–6.7× price-to-income, near the middle of the pack). What they share instead is purpose-built short-term-rental supply: Gatlinburg's economy runs on cabin rentals in the Smoky Mountains gateway; Savannah's historic district has a dense, long-established vacation-rental market; and metro Orlando includes Kissimmee's HOA-zoned vacation-home subdivisions — entire communities built and platted specifically for short-term rental, not converted from the long-term housing stock. San Jose's unaffordability, by contrast, is a scarcity-and-income story: a small, geographically constrained metro with some of the country's highest tech salaries bidding up a fixed supply of homes. Two different housing pressures, two different root causes, and — per this data — not much overlap between them.
What this means for STR policy and housing research
For city councils and STR regulators, the practical lesson is that "Airbnb is competing with our housing supply" is a claim worth measuring market by market, not assuming nationally — the ratio ranges from 2.03× down to 0.04× across cities we checked, a 50× spread. A one-size-fits-all STR cap calibrated to Gatlinburg's numbers would be wildly overcalibrated for Dallas. For housing researchers, the near-zero correlation with price-to-income is itself a finding: it argues against using STR density as a proxy for general affordability pressure, and for treating vacation-market STR saturation and income-driven unaffordability as separate lines of inquiry. For anyone building STR or housing-market tooling, both source datasets are queryable over one REST API each, so this exact join is reproducible for any metro pair you care about.
Query both datasets yourself
Airbnb Markets (7.85M listings, 60+ countries) and Housing Markets (17.9M region-months, US) — both queryable over one REST API. Join them by metro, state or country for your own study.
Frequently asked questions
Where does Airbnb have more listings than homes for sale?
Gatlinburg, TN (whose official Redfin metro is Sevierville, TN), Savannah, GA, and Orlando, FL — joining Crawlora's Airbnb Markets and Housing Markets datasets by metro shows ratios of 2.03x, 1.80x and 1.65x respectively (Airbnb listings divided by active for-sale housing inventory, same metro, mid-2026).
Does more Airbnb listings mean a metro is less affordable?
No - across the 16 metros measured, the correlation between a metro's Airbnb-to-inventory ratio and its housing price-to-income ratio is essentially zero (r = -0.12). San Jose, the priciest metro measured (16.24x price-to-income), has a below-average Airbnb ratio (0.63x), while the most STR-saturated metros (Gatlinburg, Savannah, Orlando) sit in the middle of the price-to-income range.
Why are Gatlinburg, Savannah and Orlando the most Airbnb-saturated metros?
They're purpose-built vacation destinations rather than general housing-scarcity stories: Gatlinburg's economy runs on cabin rentals in the Smoky Mountains gateway, Savannah's historic district has a dense long-established vacation-rental market, and metro Orlando includes Kissimmee's HOA-zoned vacation-home subdivisions built specifically for short-term rental.
Is this comparing Airbnb listings to the total housing stock?
No - it compares Airbnb's listing stock (every distinct listing observed) to a metro's active for-sale inventory (homes listed for sale in a given month), not to the total number of homes in the metro, which is a much larger and less informative denominator for this question.
What is the average Airbnb-to-housing-inventory ratio across major US metros?
Aggregated across the 16 metros in this study: 71,643 Airbnb listings against 196,401 homes for sale, a combined ratio of about 0.365 - roughly one Airbnb listing for every three homes on the market. The three vacation-town outliers pull that average up considerably.