Airbnb rentals are running short as San Francisco braces for Salesforce's 170,000 user conference (CRM)

pulse

October 17, 2017 8:47 PM

If you're planning to attend Salesforce's Dreamforce event, you better book a room now.

If you're planning to head to San Francisco next month for Salesforce's annual user conference, you could have a tough time finding a place to stay if you haven't booked a room already.

Even though Dreamforce doesn't start for another 19 days, accommodations listed on Airbnb are already close to being sold out during the conference. Around 3,000 accommodations in the city are already booked for the entirety of the event, which lasts from November 6 through 9. And only 15% of listings in the city are still available for those dates.

As of this week, 6,000 guests are booked to arrive at their San Francisco Airbnb accommodations on the first night of Dreamforce. The typical nightly rental price for the dates while it's in session is $260.

Over all, Airbnb expects to have 7,500 guests total for the dates of the events — a 63% increase from the same period the week before, which will have 4,600 people staying across the city.

The impending shortfall in accommodations is little surprise, given that Dreamforce is already sold out and is expected to host 170,000 attendees.

Those numbers may seem small compared to, say, the 3.5 million people who line up to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. But they're quite large in a city as compact as San Francisco. Indeed, the expected number of Dreamforce attendees is equivalent to nearly 20% of San Francisco's population of 874,000 people.

Big events like Dreamforce tends attract new renters and hosts to Airbnb, which makes its money on transaction fees. The platform brands itself as a way for locals to make extra money by renting out a spare bedroom or a full-apartment when they're out of town.

Of course, San Francisco also has a traditional hotel industry that also sees bookings go up when tech conferences are in town. At one such hotel, Hotel Zelos, only a few of its 202 rooms remain available during Dreamforce. Most of the reservations were made around June, when Salesforce opened up registration for the conference, Sietse Nabben, the hotel's general manager, said.

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