Super Bowl turns NYC housing into hotels

With hotel rooms going fast, New Yorkers invite football fans home for a price

MetLife Stadium and Airbnb founders Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky
MetLife Stadium and Airbnb founders Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky

The Super Bowl is more than four months away but reservations for NYC’s hotel rooms are going fast. That means there are some lucrative opportunities for New Yorkers willing to rent their apartments out the week of the game at MetLife Stadium. Some hopefuls — eschewing legal worries — are advertising their homes for more than $10,000 on game week.

According to the New York Daily News, New Yorkers are taking to websites such as Airbnb and Craigslist to advertise their apartments for the week of the big game. One Craigslist user, Scott Atkinson, is asking $12,000 for his two-bedroom Chelsea apartment the week of the game.

“You figure four or five guys staying at a hotel in Midtown . . . they’d be paying at least $500 or $600 a night,” Atkinson told the Daily News. “That’s about $17,000 for the week. And they don’t even have a kitchen or a view of the High Line!”

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New York residents trying to make a bit of extra cash are helped by the fact that in some cases hotels are jacking prices four times the typical rate for the Super Bowl. Rooms at the W hotel in Hoboken were raised to a starting price of $619 a night and it’s already completely booked. The Marriott Marquis in Times Square wants twice what Midtown hotels would normally charge in the off-season, with prices ranging from $499 to $699 a night.

“Occupancy that week is likely to approximate 100 percent for hotels in Midtown,” hotel consultant John Fox told the Daily News. [NYDN]Christopher Cameron