Introduction
Los Angeles is undoubtedly one of the top travel destinations in the United States, and even the world! There is never a shortage of things for visitors to do with the many Hollywood movie studios, art museums, parks, beaches, and much more. The rich culture and numerous tourist attractions draw in people from around the world. According to the Airports Council International, Los Angeles International (LAX) was the third busiest airport in the world in 2019, in terms of annual passenger traffic.
Now, imagine you’ve decided to plan a trip to Los Angeles for your next mini-vacation and are now looking on AirBnB for a place to stay during your trip.
Los Angeles County is the biggest county in the U.S., so you may be a little overwhelmed by the amount of options you have here. Where do you even start? Do you look for the cheapest place? Do you find the place with the best ratings?
The goal of this article is to give you a high-level overview of LA’s AirBnB listing demographics. It is my hope that you will walk away with a starting point and direction in your search for a place to stay in Los Angeles.
In order to do this, I looked at data on AirBnB listings in Los Angeles county found here. As compiled on May 8, 2020, the data contains 37,048 listings.
One small issue here: there were listings with a nightly price as high as $25,000, which aren’t very representative of the data. So for the purposes of this analysis, I considered listings with a price of more than $750 to be outliers and removed them, leaving 35,563 listings remaining.
Where can we find low-cost versus high-end properties?
Let us start with the factor that most people are concerned with — price. With the listings grouped by neighborhood, I took the average listing price of each neighborhood. This way, we can get a sense of which neighborhoods are cheap or expensive. I only included neighborhoods that had at least 50 listings because the average price of a neighborhood with very few listings may not be a very reliable indicator of whether that neighborhood is cheap or expensive.
In figure 1, we can see the neighborhoods surrounding Downey without any color and stretching northeast past West Covina, which means that the neighborhoods in these areas each have less than 50 listings. This is also true of most of the valley areas between Central Los Angeles and Palmdale to the north. So we know that if we search these areas, our options will be more limited compared to the rest of LA.
Historic South-Central is the cheapest neighborhood with an average listing price of $46.75 and Malibu is the most expensive neighborhood with an average listing price of $368.94.
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