A report by the Economic and Social Research Institute indicates no evidence connecting a rise in Airbnb listings to a decrease in new tenancies within the rental market.
Instead of delivering the anticipate 12,000 rental properties into the housing market, the ESRI found the impact would be negligible and noted the strong correlation between current Airbnb listings and previously recorded holiday homes, primarily in rural regions, with a weaker link in urban settings.
Short-term lets predominantly exist in tourist areas along the west coast. Two-thirds of Airbnb listings were for entire properties concentrated in tourist hotspots in the west coast, inner-city Dublin and Galway.
The report outlines that Airbnb constitutes 10pc of the rental market across 38 out of 166 local electoral areas, showing especially high concentrations in coastal resorts and urban sectors.
Despite government measures aimed at limiting Airbnb, the report suggests these have largely been ineffective in regulating the market.
The report also highlights how lucrative short-term lets are. Property owners on average would only need to rent out their homes on Airbnb for six to eight days a month in coastal areas, or eight to 10 days a month in Dublin city, to obtain the same revenue as they would if they put them on the private rental sector.
The Department of Housing had indicated that approximately 12,000 Airbnbs w0uld transition to the long-term rental market with the implementation of new regulations.
Instead, the report concluded there is no correlation between increased Airbnb activity and the reduction in new tenancies at the local authority level.
The report acknowledges that while Airbnbs may not be the main cause of falls in available accommodation, they can exacerbate issues in certain localities. It says there is a strong correlation” between current listings and holiday homes in rural spots.Restrictions on short-term lets may not have a significant impact on making rents in the long-term rental market any cheaper, according to the report.
Property owners can potentially earn the same revenue from short-term letting on Airbnb with significantly fewer rental days compared to long-term rentals, particularly in coastal regions and Dublin.
The need for better data collection through a new short-term let register is underscored to ensure informed policy-making that balances tourist accommodation with housing availability for locals.
Rachel Slaymaker, of ESRI shared: “it will be important to take local markets into account and to tailor policies around short-term letting accordingly.
“We need better data. The proposed short-term let register that was announced last week will be crucial for ensuring a balanced approach to regulation that considers both the need for tourist accommodation and rental housing for locals,” she said.
“At the moment, we’re just using data scraped from random websites, but regulators and policymakers need to have a better understanding so they can monitor activities in the rental sector.”
There are very sizeable numbers of short-term lets in particular areas, especially in central Dublin, Galway and along the west coast where we’ve seen a big fall in the number of new tenancy commencements and availability in the private renting sector.”
It is misattributed to the short term. We’ve seen that the areas that have seen the biggest increases in short-term let activity are actually those generally in the coastal areas – there’s a high relationship there between current short-term listing and previous holiday homes.
This suggests many of these properties would not be expected to be found in the private rental sector even in the absence of Airbnb. Any restriction on activity may therefore not have the desired effect of greatly increasing supply in these areas.”
So the policy responses need to be quite different for somewhere like the centre of Dublin, where short-term lets could have been private rental properties at a different time, and in the tourist areas where those properties might have never been in the private rental sector before.”
“Government measures to restrict the use of Airbnb may have discouraged some hosts but appears to have been ‘largely ineffective. The numbers which applied for either voluntary registration or change of use planning permission were relatively small relative to the number of Airbnb listings.”
