Airbnb market in Brussels

Airbnb claims that it enables people to let their room or house sporadically to tourists and expats and that this allows travelers to experience the more authentic, non-touristic neighborhoods of a city. A new study from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel funded by Innoviris shows that almost half of the dwellings on Airbnb in Brussels Capital Region are offered by 'investors' and 'professionals' and that they are highly clustered in the touristic hotspots and the European quarter. 11.427 dwellings on Airbnb in 2019 . In 2019, 11.427 dwellings were offered on the Airbnb platform in Brussels Capital Region. "These dwellings were offered for 159 days per year on average", states professor Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe, "We chose to study the year of 2019 because we wanted to know the situation before Corona, but we plan to analyse soon the stock of Airbnbs during the Covid years of 2020 and 2021." These Airbnb dwellings were highly concentrated in the touristic neighborhood around the Grand Place and La Monnaie (the so-called îlot Sacré ) and around the European institutions near Parc Léopold and Schuman (see the map below). But also around Atomium we see many Airbnb listings. "The distance from the city centre and the number of restaurants in the environment appear to be strong predictors for the Airbnb density in a neighborhood: the further away from the Grand Place and the less restaurants there are, the less dwellings are available on Airbnb", clarifies economist Marek Endrich.