Feb. 03–To believe the buzz, it would seem every hotel room from Sonoma to Salinas, every "HUGE 6B/4b House+ Office/Baby Room" on Airbnb, along with every Couchsurfing sofa and Craigslist treehouse will be packed with football fans this weekend.
There is, however, still plenty of room at the Super Bowl inn.
Yes, thousands of corporate guests have scooped up local hotel rooms, often at exorbitant prices. And yes, Airbnb says its regional hosts have booked about 4,000 properties around the Bay for Sunday's big game. But no, not every hotel is filled nor will every wide-eyed dreamer in the sharing-economy make out like a bandit this week.
"I'm one of Airbnb's top 10 places in San Jose and I've got 85 five-star reviews, but I've gotten no inquiries about my house near Willow Glen so I'm a little frustrated right now," said Rebecca Morgan, a veteran Airbnb "super host" asking $249 for a bedroom/bath combination that normally goes for $162. She said she and her fellow hosts "are kind of scratching our heads. I'm lowering my price 10 percent and I'll see what happens, but we don't know what's going on."
What's going on, say many in the Bay Area hospitality business, is a muddled accommodations picture borne of pre-Super Bowl hype, notoriously opaque guest data, hoteliers' miscalculations and good old-fashioned greed, all set within a tech-obsessed region that sees the sharing economy as another Gold Rush.
Super Bowl 50 Host Committee leaders have said they expect as many as one million visitors for the Feb. 7 game and the events surrounding it, though those estimates have been questioned in press reports as being unrealistically high. Whatever the number, it's assumed that many will be residents from around the Bay Area or staying with friends so they wouldn't need a hotel room.
"We're seeing a glut of supply out there," said Ian McHenry, co-founder of Beyond Pricing, which helps peer-to-peer hosts determine how much to charge. "You hear the same thing from your friends who all think they're going to put their place up and easily rent it out, but a lot of people will be disappointed."
McHenry has seen it happen with every Super Bowl: "The NFL buys up blocks of hotel rooms, the media report that, people looking for places to stay start panicking, so people start listing on Airbnb for thousands of dollars a night, then the media picks up on that until you have a glut of supply because everyone wants in on the action. But," he said, "most of these properties will just sit there and get no offers."
Airbnb's own figures seem to confirm that trend. Of the approximately 10,000 Super Bowl listings in the Bay Area, the company's projections show about 6,000 of them are still available, which would mean only 40 percent of hosts trying to rent out their rooms, condos and houses for Super Bowl have been successful with only a few days left to Game Day.
Airbnb host Daniel Rusteen was one of the lucky ones — at first. The North Beach resident and former Airbnb accountant listed his couch for Super Bowl at $100 and got a bite, "but then I talked with my roommates and we thought we could get more. So we asked $125, but we haven't gotten any more inquiries."
Rusteen attributes that in part to a program Airbnb has been running since July to increase its supply of properties, "so while I'm seeing demand for Super Bowl week is high, the supply is equally high. That means you can't charge a huge premium unless it's a luxury property near the stadium in Santa Clara where you might get corporate folks. But if you just want to rent out a regular house, you won't get rich off this Super Bowl."
The sharing economy that Airbnb represents is, of course, intertwined with the traditional world of hotels and motels, with each branch symbiotically influencing the other. And while some industry estimates show in-demand places like San Francisco are at or close to fully booked, hotel operators around the region paint a different picture.
"We are at about 60 percent occupancy right now," said Momi Assayag, manager of The Inn at Jack London Square across the Bay in Oakland which raised its game-week rates from $145 to $299 per night. "Normally this time of year, we'd have 50 percent occupancy, so we're only up slightly. This is not what we expected; there are a lot of rooms available and some hotels have now begun reducing their rates."
To the south in San Jose, Hotel Valencia on swanky Santana Row still had rooms as of a few days ago, said general manager Bonnie Best. And that's even more surprising given the fact that room rates were bumped only slightly for Super Bowl, from around $350-$450 up to $500 with a two-night minimum. Part of the reason for the softer-than-expected bookings, according to Best, is geographical.
"A lot of out-of-town visitors don't understand exactly where the stadium is in relation to San Francisco and San Jose, so that spreads the bookings out over a huge area, unlike last year's Super Bowl in Phoenix where hotels were clustered closer to the stadium.
"Everybody thought there'd be this big push," said Best. "But talking with other managers, it's not my impression that very many hotels are actually sold out."
Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, would disagree, claiming that hotel occupancy in the city around Super Bowl would be near 100 percent, versus the typical 85 percent. He also said average room rates would jump from the typical $231 a night to "north of $400."
Asked how he arrived at these bullish figures, Lazarus said, "This is a calculation based on past Super Bowl experiences. I estimated a 95 percent occupancy in San Francisco because everybody will be full — I think that's a given. It's not unusual for a major event in San Francisco to have close to 100 percent occupancy."
And yet rooms are still easy to find in downtown San Francisco and in Santa Clara close to the stadium, just days before Super Bowl. Ruby Jakhu, who owns Granada Inn about three miles from Levi's Stadium, said he's only 50 percent booked, despite raising his rates by only $50, to $199 per night, while other nearby hotels are asking much more.
And in San Francisco, where a luxury one-bedroom apartment in Cole Valley was listed this week for $550 a night on superbowlrentals.us, a visitor could instead grab a $279 room at the TraveLodge on conveniently located Market Street at Valencia. And with reasonably priced hotel rooms still on the market from Oakland to the South Bay, wannabe private-home hosts like Akhil Seth in the Silver Creek neighborhood of San Jose is about to throw in the towel.
"I tried to rent out my house, which has six-plus bedrooms, 4,500 square feet, a swimming pool, mini golf and a basketball court," said the 40-year-old entrepreneur. "But I don't think it's happening. I listed it for $4,800 a night but got no response at all. So I lowered it to $3,800 but still no response."
Insurance adjuster Jim Nevins in Burlingame suffered a crushed Super Bowl dream like the others.
"I first put the ad in three weeks ago on Airbnb and Craigslist, and I haven't had a single call," said Nevins, who was inspired to list his house for $1,500 a night after seeing someone from Tripping.com on Channel 2 encouraging homeowners to rent out their properties "because the hotels are all booked. But I've watched the online rental sites, and I never saw any of the expensive homes come off the listing."
That made Nevins wonder whether he was wasting his time. So did the fact that hospitality websites were plumb full of possibilities.
"I saw rooms available on Hotels.com, and I thought why would anyone want to rent my house when they can get a nice hotel room for a few hundred bucks?" he wondered. "There are tons of hotel rooms available, so I'm going to pull my ad."
Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.
