Airbnb Developing Their Own Apartment Buildings?

Riviera-May News recently posted that Airbnb is building their own luxury apartment complex in the Cancun Hotel Zone, which will compete directly with the hotel sector.

This, they write, came from real estate developer Miguel Ángel Lemus Mateos, who reports that the vacation property platform is in the process of building a 12-apartment real estate project in the Hotel Zone that will cater to luxury vacationers.

Lemus explained that the investment is ready and construction will begin at the end of 2018. The project will have nightly prices reaching as high as $1,000 USD and each apartment will be completely furnished, offer luxury finishes and a minimum of three bedrooms.

(UPDATE 05/07/18: Shortly after posting this story we were notified by Airbnb's communication's agency in Mexico that this is actually false - Airbnb is not involved with this project and clarified that they do not have any projects nor partnerships of this sort underway in Mexico, nor planned for the future. They did verify, however, that there is a partnership with Niido in this U.S., for this type of project, as mentioned below.)

This is not Airbnb's first venture into developing their own real estate projects. There’s already a 324-unit building in the works in Kissimmee, Florida, and Airbnb’s developer partner plans to open at least three more U.S. based projects by the end of 2018.

This seems to be Airbnb's way to get around tight rental restrictions that effect tenants who want to rent out their units when they aren't using them. HOA regulations in many U.S. and Canadian city apartment buildings often limit the extent to which this can be done. So rather than trying to convince them otherwise, Airbnb is just building their own rental apartments without the restrictions.

In Airbnb's Florida project, tenants will have permission to sub-rent their homes on Airbnb for up to 180 days per year, as long as they give their landlord a portion of the revenue they make. The apartments also will be designed to make life easy both for home-sharing hosts and guests — with features such as keyless entry, shared common spaces and a “master host” at each property who can assist with checking guests in and cleaning. The package comes with a new Airbnb-integrated app that tenants can use to manage their short-term rentals.

Hmmm... I wonder how the local hotel associations are going to react to this?