There's a clearing price for hotel rooms in NYC based on the built number of hotel rooms. If everyone viewed airbnb and hotels as fundamentally interchangeable

There's a clearing price for hotel rooms in NYC based on the built number of hotel rooms. If everyone viewed airbnb and hotels as fundamentally interchangeable then the range of prices for airbnb units would be similar to the range of prices for hotel rooms at that time - but this would be lower than the current range of prices for hotel rooms, as the supply of available rooms will have increased. Having said that, I think the airbnb market in NYC is reasonably close to clearing with the hotel market. Probably some listings for very nice apartments and also some for relatively mediocre apartments are underpriced, but the truth is that a night in a decent airbnb apartment is in general commensurate with the cost of a hotel room in the same neighborhood. The catch, of course, is that there are many airbnb listings in places without hotel rooms at all - Harlem, the far Upper East Side, etc - and in those areas the airbnb prices appear low but of course we don't know the appropriate hotel room clearing price. But to your basic point, I agree there's probably some discount right now for the general sense that airbnb is "weird" or "idiosyncratic" to the average traveller.