Data from short lets platform Airbnb reveals that the typical London ‘host’ or landlord made £3,500 from letting a room or property in 2015.

The data – which only looks up to the end of 2015 and has been published by Airbnb itself – shows there were 983,000 visitors to London that year who used Airbnb, split amongst 24,100 hosts. 

The typical host apparently let out accommodation for 50 nights during the year – a critical figure given the recent controversy about people letting for over 90 nights – and the average length of stay was 4.8 nights.

Airbnb, although only high profile in recent years, has in fact been operating since 2008 and the platform uses some of that data to find long-term trends, one of which is that outer London boroughs have become increasingly popular recently.

Havering, for example, increased its business amongst Airbnb users by 161 per cent in 2015; Hillingdon was up by 159 per cent, and Barnet by 140 per cent. By contrast Islington increased a more modest 63 per cent, with the City of London up 59 per cent and Hackney by 52 per cent.