Apartment Developers Adopt Airbnb Strategy

Airbnb Shaddow Supply panel at ALIS

LOS ANGELES—Apartment developers are looking at an Airbnb-style strategy as a way to monetize vacant apartment units during the lease-up and stabilization phase of new developments. At ALIS this week, Jason Fudin, director of strategic projects at Vornado Realty, said that the company is launching Y Hotel to “monetize un-leased apartment rooms during lease up.” Overall, other hoteliers on the panel were not concerned about peer-to-peer stock affecting hotel occupancies.

Vornado Realty has already rolled out the strategy, which they are calling a pop-up hotel, in Washington DC, where the firm is based. The company sees this as an appropriate blending of sectors that marries the inherent parallel between residential and hospitality type properties, especially as apartment buildings include more and more hotel-style amenities. “We are more concerned with what this means across the asset class,” he said at ALIS. “That is interesting.”