The Evolution of Short-Term Rentals Research in the Airbnb Era: A Systematic Literature Review

This study synthesizes the Airbnb-era literature on short-term rentals (STRs) as a financialized real estate use that links hospitality cash flows to residential asset pricing and urban regulation. Using the PRISMA protocol and a tri-method design—bibliometric mapping (VOSviewer), quantitative systematic review, and thematic content analysis (NVivo)—we analyze 868 peer-reviewed journal articles published from 2008–2025 across hospitality, business, real estate finance, and urban economics. The corpus documents a paradigmatic shift from early work on platform adoption, guest experience, and hotel competition toward research on property valuation, rental yields, investment risk, neighborhood externalities, and regulatory policy, with increasing thematic convergence across hospitality and real estate outlets. Density-based bibliometric clusters concentrate around housing affordability and regulation, consistent with STRs reallocating housing supply and reshaping neighborhood equilibrium. Empirical findings increasingly show that STR expansion is associated with higher rents and house prices, while stringent restrictions and bans reduce STR activity and can moderate rents and prices, with effects that vary by neighborhood conditions and enforcement regimes. These results position STRs as an operating real estate asset class whose valuation depends on volatile cash flows and policy risk, informing appraisal practice, portfolio allocation, and municipal welfare analysis.