Airbnb's Live There app, introduced this past spring. The Internet has been instrumental in growing home-sharing platforms. (Photo: Airbnb)

NEWPORT BEACH, CA—Its latest round of financing values Airbnb at about $30 billion, or roughly on par with Marriott International and Hilton Worldwide. Green Street Advisors aptly uses the term “800-lb. gorilla” to describe the San Francisco-based company's place in the home-sharing sector. These two facts taken together would appear to support the argument that Airbnb represents a clear and present danger to the hotel industry, and to a lesser extent a threat to multifamily owners.

Or maybe the lodging CEOs who have downplayed the risk have it right after all. In a report titled “Airbnb—There's Room Enough for Everyone,” Green Street analysts say that hoteliers' concerns about the home-sharing giant's competitive profile may be “overdone.” For a variety of reasons, the analysts write, “the odds seem to favor a world in which hotels and home sharing can peacefully co-exist.”

In fact, they've co-existed peaceably for decades, albeit in a world where the home-sharing sector has been highly fragmented until the advent of larger operators such as HomeAway and Airbnb in the past decade. “While the Internet has helped grow the home-sharing business, it is interesting to note that home-sharing has been around for a long time, and was already a large industry before the recent wave of online platforms,” according to the Green Street report. The Swiss and Dutch teachers' unions, for instance, agreed to a home-sharing alliance as long ago as 1953.