Is it OK to move the couch to create a dance floor in your Airbnb? How about taking bath towels from your vacation rental to the beach?
The answer, according to research from University of Georgia researcher Sarah Whitley, depends on who owns the house or condo you’re renting.
“What we find is that people are more likely to engage in what we call territorial behaviors — behaviors that suggest you have some claim or ownership of that object — if the entity you rent from is a company rather than a person,” said Whitley, assistant professor of marketing at UGA’s Terry College of Business.
Whitley and her co-author, Northeastern University’s Nirajana Mishra, published their paper about psychological ownership and the sharing economy — “Psychological Ownership and Territorial Behaviors in Rental Transactions: Why Who You Rent from Matters” — in the Journal of Marketing in April.
“My co-author and I noticed that, when we would stay at Airbnbs, we felt like we needed to do more to keep it clean and take care of the place in general,” Whitley said. “But when we stayed at a hotel, I didn’t feel that sense of duty or guilt. I could do whatever I wanted. And so, we thought there must be something there.”
Whitley and Mishra interviewed Airbnb hosts about their guests’ behaviors, ran text analysis of thousands of Airbnb comments and conducted experiments with hundreds of consumers to see how renters of books, cars and vacation homes engaged with their short-term rentals.
Repeatedly, they found that people were more likely to act like they owned the rentals — marking in books, taking cars off-road, moving sofas — when they rented from a company rather than a person.
“We’re more likely to move a bunch of furniture around or have a party if it’s rented from a company versus a person,” Whitley said.
Whitley and Mishra also found that renters of company-owned homes were more likely to get angry if they lost their use of part of the home — for instance, if a parking space was stolen or the patio was out of bounds due to repairs. Those renting from people were much more understanding of this type of inconvenience, Whitley said.
It may not seem like relocated furniture, a sandy towel or a snarky review about parking is the end of the world, but each territorial behavior adds to the cost and time spent by the host, Whitley said. Negative reviews are directly related to reputational damage and lost revenue.
The takeaway for hosts is that highlighting personal connection to their property can encourage renters to take better care of their rentals, no matter if they own one or 20.
“A lot of people have become professional hosts, and when they do that, they want to establish an LLC and make it look more professional,” Whitley said. “But when they start referring to that company on the rental site, they need to know that people are going to treat their property differently.
“It’s better to be ‘John, a host with 20 properties,’ rather than ‘Vacation Rentals Inc.’”