To make more money renting short term than long term you have to be in a very desirable location in a town/city with a lot of tourist traffic, and you have to keep your labor and energy costs down ruthlessly.

Most cleaning companies want $30 an hour. You need to pay $120 to do a turnover. Plus you need to buy many things and replace them regularly. And you need to pay for utilities.

Unless you can book for high prices, at least $250 a night and more like $399 a night on weekends in season, and keep the calendar pretty full, its not worth it.

I moved to San Jose last year and could not find an affordable place to live long term. I got incredibly lucky finding a place on craigslist for $600/mo but discovered one month later that it was because the landlord was kicking everyone out in another 2 months so he could give the house to his mother.

There was so much competition for places to live that I couldn't find another apartment for under $1000.

I ended up moving to an Airbnb that was $25/d. At any time I was living with 6-12 other people, host included. 14 beds total -- 4 bedrooms with 1 or 2 bunkbeds in each room and the host's (and gf's) room with a double bed, which he would occasionally share with a guest. I would have never expected that to be a good experience and would not have signed up for long-term housing like that, but I actually loved it and stayed for a year.

Point is, Airbnb lets you cram more people into a small living space than someone renting might be willing to do, so in big cities you can make the argument that though Airbnb reduces supply of housing, it also reduces demand for housing so there might be a total sum of more housing available