Abstract
Sharing economy is matching of excess demand and supply in the society along with the use of internet, enabling peer-to-peer transactions. There is not yet have a universally agreed definition of the concept, but it can be summarized as activities occur when people agree to share, barter, lend, rent, gift, or swap their underutilized goods, skills, or services to another with small fees or other compensation (Botsman & Roger, 2010; Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012; Belk, 2014). House sharing is one of segmentation that has largest shares in sharing economy. This reseach will refer this short-term home sharing as Accommodation Service on Sharing Economy Platform (ASSEP). There are studies portrayed that ASSEP worsened affordable housing supply and made for gentrification in many cities (Lee, 2016; Horn & Merante, 2017; Barron, Kung, & Procerpio, 2018; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018). Currently, Thailand is still facing shortage of middle-to-low income housing for labor, especially in Bangkok. New housing units delivered by private developer and usually sold in unaffordable price for labor or first jobber, even there are excess supply of housing market in Bangkok. Thus, rental house is one of the accommodation choices for labor and first jobber. However, there is a great possibility that ASSEP may distort the rental housing market. This study aims at clarifying a mechanism transferring rental houses to ASSEP and which rental housing market segments ASSEP tends to influence on, in terms of housing types, locations and price segments in Bangkok. Also, there are no empirical study addressing this problem in Bangkok, while the ASSEB is emerging there. There are two research questions: 1) What are dominant factors influence rental house owners in Bangkok to transfer their properties to ASSEP? 2) Which housing market segments, in terms of housing types, locations, and in this study price segmentation, tends to transfer to ASSEP in Bangkok? This research carried five steps to investigate the transferring mechanism of rental house to ASSEP in Bangkok: context analysis of ASSEP, geographical analysis, data collection, net rental yield (NRY) calculation, and transferring mechanism analysis. First, demand side (tourists, price gap between traditional hotels/ASSEP, pricing strategy) and supply side (government laws and regulations, ASSEP hosts and motivations, room availability and fees) of ASSEP in Bangkok were analyzed. After that, geographical distribution of major platform suppliers of ASSEP were classified using main activity of the area as criteria: touristic & shopping district, office area, and residential area. Locations of ASSEP were mapped. One study area in each location were selected to collect further data for NRY calculation. The result finds that in touristic & shopping area, ASSEP are clustered in Phra Nakhon district. Bang Rak district is office district that has the most of ASSEP located there. Meanwhile, Huai Khwang district is residential area with largest numbers of ASSEP. Location is the dominant factor in influencing rental house owners to transfer their property to ASSEP, especially in tourist & shopping area and office area. In tourism & shopping area and office area, NRY of ASSEP is higher, thus rental house owners are more likely to transfer their house to ASSEP. In residential area with less accessible to mass transportation, NRY of rental house is higher and owners are more likely to remain their business. Hence, ASSEP has not distorted seriously the rental housing market for low-to-medium income group at this moment yet, because the most of ASSEP in tourism & shopping area and office area have been transformed from the rental housing segment for rather higher income group. Also, research results are discussed with demand and supply context of ASSEP.
