🛗 An apartment-sized elevator

Airbnb may have a new competitor on the block: its own hosts.

Edwin Dorsey of newsletter The Bear Cave wrote that amid a deluge of terrible experiences, the Airbnb community has drifted away from independent offerings toward professionally managed vacation rentals.

They’re often highly rated and, most importantly, reliable. They’re also taking over.

• Per AirDNA, just 1% of Airbnb and Vrbo hosts are professional property managers, but account for 23% of all listings and 28% of total revenue.

Dorsey’s hypothesis…

… is that these superhosts are building their own booking platforms and websites, and offering discounts for private reservations.

• Airbnb guests and hosts pay 14% and 3% fees, respectively.
• Dorsey’s report found a two-night Stay Heirloom listing that was ~$125 cheaper than on Airbnb; we found a Fort Lauderdale Stays listing that was about ~$344 less for a four-night stay.

Upon the release of Dorsey’s report — which highlighted several negative Airbnb guest experiences ranging from unpleasant to deadly — shares dipped 5%, per Reuters.

Is there any good news for Airbnb here?

Hosts Sara and Tony Robinson, who manage 22 listings, previously told Business Insider they were ditching Airbnb to have more control over bookings and avoid fees, though they questioned whether a newcomer could fill their calendar without Airbnb or Vrbo.

And that’s what Airbnb does have: a huge platform and a lot of name recognition, which puts hosts in front of guests without requiring them to spend on marketing or outreach.

It also had a pretty solid 2022, with revenue up 40% and active listings up 16% YoY in Q4 2022.

Of course, one of the biggest competitors may remain the old-fashioned hotel, which doesn’t charge a cleaning fee then ask you to mop.

Talk about nailing your numbers.

Last year, the US posted record spending on construction related to manufacturing — which you can think of as investments made toward building the stuff that builds your stuff.

After growing ~4% annually for decades, America’s production capacity has been seemingly stuck in the mud ever since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Spending, however, has continued to rise, and the US may finally be breaking ground on building that capacity back up: In 2022, capacity grew at its highest level since 2015, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Behind the rise?

Cars and chips — not the potato variety, as much as we’d like that to be the case.

Partly influenced by the rethinking of supply chains in the aftermath of pandemic struggles, the CHIPS and Science Act is now putting billions of dollars toward semiconductor manufacturing capacity, and the Inflation Reduction Act is putting billions more into EV battery production.

• Measured in square footage, WSJ found these two industries accounted for about half of all US manufacturing construction in 2022.

Whether America can actually find enough people to get these factories up and running is another question. The National Association of Manufacturers says its industry — which represents ~10% of the US workforce, or ~13m people — is still short 800k workers.

We’ve newly discovered an elevator in India that can transport up to 235 people at once. Think you’ve got it in you to NOT learn more about it?

… that’s what we thought. Settle in, friend, you’re gonna be here for another 250 words.

Let’s talk specs

The ~277.5-square-foot elevator was unveiled last year at the Jio World Centre in Mumbai by Finnish vertical transport juggernaut Kone Corporation.

The largest passenger elevator in the world, India’s honkin’ new lift weighs 16 tons, is supported by 18 pulleys and nine ropes, and moves between five floors at a speed of 1.3 feet/second.

• You could lay an adolescent giraffe down on its side and it would fit inside — we haven’t tried, but wish we could.

And we should mention it once more: The elevator can carry 235 people in one go.

Wanna see this baby in action via overdramatic promo video? Of course you do.

Where does Kone test its elevator tech?

Glad you asked — this side quest similarly blew our minds. Kone is among the “Big Five” in the global elevator business alongside Thyssenkrupp, Otis, Schindler, and Mitsubishi.

But per Elevator World, Kone is in a league of their own when it comes to their testing facility, which hosts the world’s deepest elevator shaft (~1,150 feet under Tytyri, Finland).

Yes, under. Because Kone HQ is in a skyscraper-free country where no building exceeds 432 feet, it had to go the other direction — conducting research underground in a limestone mine.

Its extensive acceleration, speed, braking, and deceleration testing includes a ~650-foot free-fall test. That’s 5x the drop in Disney World’s Tower of Terror.

BTW: The world’s largest freight elevator, located in China, is its own rabbit hole you can free-fall down.