No, you're thinking about this all wrong, the valuation is due to all the physical assets they own.

More seriously, these kinds of valuations send a powerful signal that physical property ownership should be viewed less and less as an asset to a company and more as a burden.

Since AirBnB shifts the property ownership over to their room network, shifts up and down in the short-term rental market hurts them and provides a buffer to AirBnB. Traditional hoteliers have to keep maintaining empty rooms in the event the industry picks back up, or build more rooms if the industry is at a high. On the flip-side, AirBnB can be sensitive to local regulations and property owners might simply decide to not have their place up for rent, making availability a slight risk.

To put this valuation into perspective, Marriott International has a Mkt Cap of $21.5B They're the 3rd largest hotel group on the planet and own something like 125,000 rooms.

Airbnb claims 1,000,000 listings, but owns none. Makes money only off of the service fees (6-12%) and credit card processing (3%).

Looked at another way, this valuation says to the hotel industry "having professional employees and facilities is eating into your bottom-line", because AirBnB simply doesn't have to assume those costs.

Prediction: regular hotel rooms will start showing up AirBnB within 5 years.

You have to look at the terms before making that judgement. It seems very unlikely that it's a straight equity deal.

You could imagine a preferred offering with a 1x liquidation preference and some modest return, for example. The details really matter here.

Yes, that very well may be true, but you do have to consider the fact that they cannot go public, or it would be difficult to do so, at a price below $24B. So whatever "special treatment" late stage investors get, they do make it much hard for themselves to realize a successful IPO exit.

Or they are hoping that the company will IPO one day and be worth 100+ billion in which case they will have quadrupled their money.