The Truth About World Cup Rentals

**Linda Rollins** (0:05)
Welcome to the STR Data Lab.

**Jamie Lane** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to the STR Data Lab. I'm Jamie Lane, Chief Economist at AirDNA. I'm joined today by two guests. We have a great topic.
It's been a topic that has been top of the line for me for the past, like, probably year now.
And I know my two guests had been in deep on, we're going to be talking about World Cup today for at least the past six to 12 months. So we have today Susan Brown with the Kansas City Short-Term Rental Alliance. She's been on the ground with hosts. She's been working with the major OTAs. She has been working with the city and has really seen how the World Cup has played out in one of the top markets in terms of trends. Kansas City was really ground zero for a lot of the major swings that we saw in both supply, demand, revenue, pricing. And Kansas City was the poster child. So really excited to get Susan's comments on what she saw in the market. And then we also have my colleague, Linda Rollins. She's a Senior Research Analyst at AirDNA. And she has been the one digging into the numbers, updating our dashboards, talking with the press, feeding them the numbers every week for, what, the past six months since we launched the blog.
So she has been our dated guru on everything. World Cup is going to give us a rundown of what we've seen in the data. What were some of the fun trends? What were some of the learnings? And then we'll play through some of the press narratives. What came true, what didn't.
But really excited and thank you guys for both joining me to talk World Cup and maybe finally put the World Cup to bed. And maybe this gives me the closure I've needed now that the game's done. We saw an exciting Spain win. I know after watching that game, I was excited that Argentina didn't take it again, but interested in you guys' thoughts on the outcome as well. So Susan, welcome.

**Susan Brown** (2:24)
Hi Jamie, thanks for having me and nice to see you too, Linda.

**Jamie Lane** (2:28)
So, Susan, I want to start with you because you really picked up the effort from the beginning. And Kansas City was out in front with host meetups, working with the OTAs, doing training on getting hosts ready to be prepared for the World Cup.
You were hearing in the predictions, hundreds of thousands of visitors, you guys were able to get special permits for hundreds of rentals to be added. Like, it just gave me a rundown of like, what was the pre-World Cup environment in Kansas City? What were your expectations going in? What were the media expectations going in? And then we'll talk a bit later about what actually happened.

**Susan Brown** (3:21)
Sure. It was, I think we all became a little bit alarmed when we heard that number of 650 people descending, 650,000 people descending on Kansas City. And we only had 65,000 hotel rooms within a 100 mile radius. And those were the numbers that we were getting from our FIFA committee, who I think they did a fabulous job overall. And I do think those numbers came very close. So we just imagined that the streets would be clogged for the entire month, that we were going to be able to pay off our houses with all this income. I think maybe what actually happened was we were able to do some remodeling, some renovations. So that's how it actually turned out. But in the beginning, we just thought it would be crazy. We wouldn't be able to drive around Kansas City. People were planning on working from home.
It was just all out.
And you're right, we were just trying to get prepared for Armageddon.

**Jamie Lane** (4:19)
Yeah. And then we were tracking the data. And obviously Kansas City was one of the least lodging supplied cities across all the markets. So there was a worry of could Kansas City accommodate all the visitors that were going to be coming in? And what did you hear from the OTAs? Like, what were they telling you in terms of what their number of listings they wanted to bring on?
A new host being generated? Like, because it was a push from everyone to get more people on line, right?

**Susan Brown** (5:00)
It was. We had, I think, those numbers scared everybody because we had the cities. So Perkville was the first small suburb that said, we're waiving all of our requirements, just open up. And Kansas City said, we're expanding our ordinance. And then we had all the cities, several dozen of our different municipalities did that. And then Airbnb came along, and they offered the $750 to open up your home. I never did hear any targeted numbers from them.