Airbnbs in NYC are overwhelmingly single apartments, not giant hotel-like networks

Airbnb has often claimed that its home-sharing hosts are mostly apartment dwellers who rent out their homes to make ends meet.

Now, for the first time, the startup is releasing the stats to prove it.

In a new data release, Airbnb claims that 95 percent of entire-home hosts only have one listing on the platform in New York City. An additional four percent (or 99 percent of the entire home listings) are from hosts with two properties.

The company is trying to dispel the myth that many Airbnb users are rental corporations or greedy landlords who are keeping units off the market by only using their home for extra income. Of the 35,966 active Airbnb listings on the platform, 19,742 are entire home units (meaning you can rent the apartment without having the host as your roommate).

In the next year, Airbnb projects that the hosts who own six or more listings will become an even smaller slice of revenue from New York. Those mega-networks of units, which include actually includes a hotel according to the company, will shrink to only 2 percent of the overall hosting revenue, compared to 7 percent now.

Airbnb made a pact in November to start releasing anonymized data about how its hosts use the platform in different cities. New York City, a often contentious market for the company, is the first city to have its data released to the public.

Here are the stats:

NOW WATCH: You can get a room in NYC for $39 a night on Airbnb - you just have to sleep in a van in Queens

Please enable Javascript to watch this video