Notes on Airbnb business in New York
Version 2 (May 2014) is much more thorough and efficient about searching Airbnb's web site for a given city and has more options. I have moved it to python 3 for better handling of unicode multi-lingual data. It is also ported to SAP SQL Anywhere to allow more flexible reporting and better concurrency than SQLite can provide. A free developer edition is available from the SAP web site.
- airbnb.py is the python script to collect data.
- plot.py just produces some charts.
airbnb.db is the data. The basic data is in the table room. A complete search of a given city's listings is a "survey" and the surveys are tracked in table survey.
To run a survey:
- add a city to the database, by running ./airbnb.py -ac "city-name". It scans the Airbnb web site and adds the neighborhoods for the city.
- add a survey to the database by running ./airbnb.py -as "city-name".
- collect the room_ids for the city by running ./airbnb.py -s survey_id. The survey_id can be seen by running ./airbnb -ls. This search loops over neighborhoods, property types, and pages of listings in the Airbnb search pages.
- fill in the details of the rooms by running ./airbnb -f.