Your commercial news round-up: Airbnb, inflation, fintech, house prices

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In this week’s round-up, we take a look at Airbnb’s new anti-party tech, UK inflation, the demand for digital banking and the drop in house prices.

• Airbnb has introduced anti-party tech to stop potentially high-risk reservations. The system will look at factors including history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the listing and time of the week people are travelling. The tool will be launched in the US and Canada and has been designed to reduce “unauthorised parties”, which impact hosts, neighbours and communities.

• UK inflation hit a 40-year high of 10.1% in July, according to the Office for National Statistics. The Consumer Price Index rose to 10.1% in the 12 months to July, an increase from 9.4% in June and remaining at the highest level since February 1982. Increasing food costs are the biggest driver of this rise, with annual inflation of these items now running at 12.7%, largely due to price rises for household basics like eggs, bread, milk and cheese.

• Fintech challenger banks Starling and Monzo come out top in UK rankings. In an official ranking of UK lenders, Starling and Monzo came out on top for both personal and business banking, showing a growing demand for digital banking among consumers.

On the other hand, the Co-operative bank, Virgin Money and HSBCS UK fell to the bottom of the list for business banking in the bi-annual survey from the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority. Royal Bank of Scotland, Virgin Money and TSB fell to the bottom of the list for personal current accounts according to the survey.

• Asking prices for homes have fallen by £4,795 – the first drop this year –  according to Rightmove. A lull in activity during the summer has been cited as the reason for the 1.3% fall in the typical asking price, which now stands at £365,173. The drop is nothing out of the ordinary according to Tim Bannister, Rightmove’s director of property science, as markets return towards normal seasonal patterns after a frenzied two years when people searched for more space in which to live and work. Bannister said: “We are still expecting price changes for the rest of the year to continue to follow the usual seasonal pattern, which means we’ll end year at around 7% annual growth, even with the wider economic uncertainty.”

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