Airbnb Files To Go Public (techcrunch.com) 38
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could go public as soon as the end of the year. A Q3 or Q4 Airbnb offering is therefore a distinct possibility.
The company promised in 2019 that it would go public in 2020, but that pledge seemed far-off in the middle of the year. Since then, Airbnb has made noise about different parts of its business coming back to life, although changed by new travel and work and vacation patterns from its users. If Airbnb has filed, we can presume that present results are good enough to get it life, else the firm would have not filed and would have simply gone public later. The question now becomes if its Q2 numbers were good enough to get it out the door, or if the company intends to update its S-1 filing with Q3 numbers, push the filing live and go public with more recovery time in its results.
The company promised in 2019 that it would go public in 2020, but that pledge seemed far-off in the middle of the year. Since then, Airbnb has made noise about different parts of its business coming back to life, although changed by new travel and work and vacation patterns from its users. If Airbnb has filed, we can presume that present results are good enough to get it life, else the firm would have not filed and would have simply gone public later. The question now becomes if its Q2 numbers were good enough to get it out the door, or if the company intends to update its S-1 filing with Q3 numbers, push the filing live and go public with more recovery time in its results.
Oh boy (Score:2)
I've always wanted to piss away a bunch of money, and this looks like the perfect black hole of financial ruin to throw it in!
Re:Oh boy (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always wanted to piss away a bunch of money, and this looks like the perfect black hole of financial ruin to throw it in!
With the timing it's pretty obvious the investors and owners all want out so they can build bunkers while they still have time.
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Their files are going public? (Score:3)
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A last ditch effort... (Score:3, Interesting)
...to raise capital in a failing economy.
The best analogy I've heard is that today's economy is behaving a lot like Wile E Coyote. He's run off a cliff, but hasn't looked down yet to realize there's nothing under him keeping him from the perils of gravity. With all it's uncertainty, there's no reason why the Dow should be as high as it is, and no reason why anyone in their right mind would invest in a company that's was struggling before coronavirus, and is on the brink of collapse afterwards. It's only a matter of time before the economy looks down and realizes there's nothing there holding it up.
we need aca 2.0 first before jail becomes the er (Score:2)
we need aca 2.0 first before jail becomes the new er
Re:A last ditch effort... (Score:4, Insightful)
The economy crashed in a horrible wreck, it was bleeding out with broken bones sticking out in several places. In stead of getting triaged at a hospital and getting fixed up like what should happen in a sane country, it called its buddy the feds who shot it sooooo high up on cash GODDAMN DOES IT FEEL GOOD. America is in for a economic disaster unseen since the 30s if those regular cash injections stop and we all have to deal with the damage from the wreck, plus the additional damage done while not feeling it, plus the cash withdrawal symptoms.
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The stock market does not care that companies may perform poorly in the next quarter or even next year. It cares how the companies around now will be performing ten years from now. Most of the recent
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The stock market is a measure of what people believe companies will be worth in the future.
In theory, yes. In actual practice, not so much.
The stock market is now almost completely divorced from reality and a company's performance/profitability is irrelevant. Your High Frequency Trading software will buy a few million shares and then sell them seconds later when the price goes up a penny. Lather rinse repeat.
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Pollux proposed:
With all it's uncertainty, there's no reason why the Dow should be as high as it is, and no reason why anyone in their right mind would invest in a company that's was struggling before coronavirus, and is on the brink of collapse afterwards.
Yeah ... no.
The reason the Dow continues to climb is very simple: investment capital (which is to say, "the algorithms used by large, institutional and other investment funds for what is essentially programmatically-driven day trading,") currently has no other avenue by which it can grow. That, in turn, is due to the housing bubble of the early Noughties, which continues to suppress real estate values, eliminating that leg of the traditional investment tripod as anything other than a hedge a
Makes Sense (Score:3)
Global economy looks like it is heading down the toilet for the next few years, tourism market hit the hardest.
Tech stocks rising to stratospheric levels, govts around the world printing money to prop up equity markets like crazy.
Seems to me they have a potential window within which to cash in on the exuberance. If they miss this, it might be another 5 years before the economy gets back to a place where they can consider an IPO again. That's a long time in tech. Best to take a bet on doing it now.
It's not "sharing" any more than is Uber (Score:4, Insightful)
People are literally buying homes to turn them into Airbnbs. The woman whose airbnb I've been staying in has two of them. Taking them off of the rental and sale market to turn them into unlicensed hotels worsens the existing housing crisis. There are already dozens to literally hundreds of people applying for each vacant rental property.
Airbnb is sociopathic, in general exists to promote violation of the law, and should be destroyed.
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And you willing support her decision while decrying it here, as well as willingly support AirBNB while decrying it here...
I couldn't find anything else. I had to live somewhere. But I suppose to you it's nobler to live in the gutter. I can see why you didn't log in. Your idea is stupid, and makes Slashdot stupid.
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"The woman whose airbnb I've been staying in has two of them."
You really didn't think this complaint through did you?
"Company A should be destroyed"
*Is actively paying and using Company A*
Try speaking with your wallet instead of the hot air coming from your mouth.
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Try speaking with your wallet instead of the hot air coming from your mouth.
Try taking Airbnb's cock out of yours before you blather. If I could have found somewhere else to stay, I'd have stayed there. But I can't, because of the Airbnbs. This really isn't that fucking complicated, except for mental midgets like you.
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It's not all bad though. Think of all the largely vacant second homes in nice places. If AirBNB increases occupancy in those, it effectively increases supply
Kind of. It does it at inflated rates that people can't really afford to pay. If people can't afford to stay in them, it doesn't really increase availability. What we should do about vacation homes is tax the living fuck out of them, and use the money to build low cost housing.
Re:AirBNB is a failing company (Score:5, Insightful)
Cities across the world are doing what they can to ensure that AirBNB can't be competitive through applying relevant hotel taxes and regulations.
FTFY. You wanna act like a hotel? Get regulated like a hotel. That means relevant fire and safety laws, health inspections, hotel taxes, etc.
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I'm not sure how all cities are doing it. But I do know that some cities/higher levels of government, have created special regulations for what are billed as "short term rentals", which is seperate from hotels.
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I used to work at a hotel. I don't know how things are everywhere, but in my city there weren't any special fire or safety regulations that didn't apply to every other house and business....If you are imagining that hotels are held to some higher standard or inspected more often than any other building, you are mistaken..
In your city private residences are legally required to have working sprinkler systems, fire alarms, lighted exit signs, emergency exits, and evacuation maps posted in every bedroom? Because those are all fire regulations that apply to hotels.
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Airbnb (Score:5, Interesting)
This would be the $31bn company that made $93 million in 2017, $200 million in 2018, and a loss of $322 million in 2019? Meaning it's not made any money in the last 3 years, and has now been hit by coronavirus?
Sorry, but these valuations are insane. The only people to profit will be those who buy quickly, sell at the height of madness, and then sit back and watch the carnage.
"Robin Hood" (Score:2)
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Not to mention how many municipalities are pretty much banning them because people perceive them as being the reason rental prices are so high. I really don't think that AirBNB contributes that much to rental rates and apartment availability, but the perception is that it is a big problem. A lot of cities have taken steps to reduce the number of permanent AirBNBs on the market. Many only allow people who are actually living in the space to rent a room or rent it for a couple weeks when they aren't in town
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Hmm, if I had to choose between that and Hertz...
Not buying the story line (Score:3)
The idea of an IPO is to obtain as much money per share as possible, and with the current crisis ongoing, there's going to be a lot of hesitation and doubt. Why wouldn't you wait for a better climate in which to roll out the IPO and get a better price? I'm guessing the incumbent investors know or suspect something and are trying to bail while they can.
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My guess is that most of Airbnb's revenues did not come from mom and pop hosts renting the spare room, but from a relatively small number of professional investors who had built up huge portfolios of prime apartments that they were milking for cashflow. These portfolios were likely massively debt leveraged against the huge cashflow that can be obtained from short-term-lets vs a normal let.
The cash stream has dried up, and the effect of the properties being dumped into the local market (and many times, parts
hype stock (Score:1)