The two-time defending national champion Georgia Bulldogs draw about 90,000 spectators to Sanford Stadium for six or seven home games each fall, essentially creating an alternative market for short-term rentals that last about three months. Real estate investors are buying and building homes for fans who will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a weekend home game, and the effects are impacting local residents year-round. According DNA of the airwhich tracks Airbnb and VRBO vacation rental performance data, there are currently 1,135 short-term rentals available in Athens (up from 865 in November 2022), and 88 percent of them comprise an entire private home.
Ms. Malcolm, who lives on the west side of Athens, runs a nonprofit called Farm to Neighborhood and a catering and food truck company, Rashe’s Cuisine, on the city’s east side, not far from the stadium Sanford. “It’s a historically black area,” she said, “so when football games happen, you start to see more non-black people coming through the neighborhood and walking to the liquor store to buy beer and go back to their rental place. “
Athens is not an outlier. Across the United States, in small towns that rely on college sports to keep their economies going, short-term rentals are destabilizing real estate markets, fueled by fans and wealthy investors who transform single-family homes into de facto hotels for a few weeks. weeks off the market. year and often leave them empty the rest of the time.
“College athletics, particularly college football, has become so huge in this country, particularly in the Southeast, that it has caused this short-term rental phenomenon,” said Adrien Bouchet, director of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at University. of Central Florida. “On the one hand, it creates value, but on the other hand, it definitely hurts people who have lived in and around the university for a long time.”
Bouchet pointed to similar market trends in Southern college towns such as Auburn, Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Gainesville, Florida, and Oxford, Mississippi, where football dominates the economy during the fall. Over the past year, short-term rental supply grew 34 percent in Tuscaloosa (home of the University of Alabama), 33 percent in Columbia, Missouri (University of Missouri), and 11 percent in South Bend, Indiana (University of Notre Dame), according to AirDNA data. Bookings usually peak in November.
