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[Jimmy-T]

More than half the empty rental properties in Sydney’s holiday hotspots are likely to be listed on Airbnb, according to a Sydney University report cited in a plea to new NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to allow curbs on short-stay lets in apartments to ease Sydney’s affordable housing crisis.

And, despite the online letting agency’s corporate message that they are all about ordinary people making extra money, relatively few Sydneysiders benefit from renting out rooms in their homes, say leading academics.

But a spokesman for Airbnb says the study is misleading and the Sydney Uni researchers should have worked with them to get a more accurate picture.

The research, published this month in the Journal of the American Planning Association, focussed on Airbnb hot spots in Sydney, where the agency’s listings have almost doubled year on year to currently sit at about 23,000.

“It is clear that providers like Airbnb are not helping the affordability problem facing many Australians on low incomes,” says Prof Nicole Gurran , co-author of the report with Prof. Peter Phibbs, Head of Urban and Regional Planning and Policy in the University’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

The report was cited in a plea from the Owners Corporation Network that the Premier consider allowing apartment blocks to ban short-stay lets to lessen the upward pressure on rents and unit prices.

 

The researchers analysed evidence from local councils and planners in City of Sydney, Waverley (taking in Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama), Marrickville, Leichhardt and Parramatta, as well as data from the independent monitoring website InsideAirbnb.com and the 2011 national census.

At the time of their research in mid last year, they discovered that City of Sydney, for instance, had a total of 1,268 entire homes available on Airbnb, almost one and a half times as many as the city’s vacant residential rentals. Airbnb currently lists more than 3,400 whole homes.

The research also showed that nearly one third of Airbnb listings in greater Sydney are held by owners of multiple properties, with frequently listed holiday lets paying $600 more per month than permanent rentals.  One Airbnb ‘superhost’ reportedly has more than 60 properties listed on the website, says Prof. Phibbs.

“We are particularly concerned by the issue of permanent residential housing being converted into the holiday tourist market, which is a drama for a city like Sydney where housing is expensive and vacancy rates are quite low,” he adds.

“The cost of rental housing in Sydney is very sensitive to changes in supply. If you are taking hundreds of properties out of the rental market and putting them into the tourist market that will have an effect on price.”

“In a market like that, you’re concerned about there not being enough rental accommodation for all the people who require it.”

He said their research showed that tighter zoning and residential development controls were needed to distinguish between the different forms of short-stay accommodation so that the impact on local communities and residents was kept in check.

Conversely, the report issued last year by the NSW parliamentary inquiry into holiday letting regulations recommended loosening the restrictions on short-term rentals.  The government is expected to respond with a Bill in April.

Prof. Phibbs warns legislators need to avoid incidents such as reported in Barcelona where entire apartment blocks of tenants were evicted so that their flats could be put on Airbnb.

“A lot of cities have taken the route of limiting the period of time Airbnb can operate, to 60 or 90 days a year,” he says. “But it’s pretty hard to work out what’s going on in terms of trying to regulate it.

“Where it works best, cities have negotiated a deal where Airbnb share their private data which enables people to monitor the number of days.  Some data-sharing has a reasonable outcome.”

Airbnb has not offered to share data with the government or councils in Sydney and Prof. Phibbs is concerned about the “alternative facts” presented by the company’s spokespeople.

“They employ a lot of salespeople to sell their message. As a researcher, it worries me when they keep pretending their business is about renting out a spare room when it’s mostly about whole properties.”

“It tries to portray itself as all about the person letting out the spare bedroom and helping them pay their mortgage, or pensioners earning a little extra,” says Prof. Phibbs.

“But a large part of their business is basically professional investors taking stock out of the residential sector and putting it into the tourist sector.”

However he insisted that he, his fellow researchers and their report were not anti-airbnb.

“There are a lot of benefits from the sharing economy but there are also risks, and we have to be careful in terms of throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. “We want people on moderate incomes to be able to live in our cities, and not get pushed out.”

“This study is misleading,” says Dylan Smith of Airbnb. “If the good people from the University of Sydney had worked with us prior to publishing their report, we might have been able to help prepare a more accurate picture with them.

“Airbnb is doing so well in Sydney, and around the world, for the simple reason that our hosts – the vast majority of which are lower and middle income people – provide guests with a more authentic way to experience places.

“Airbnb began as a means to help people pay their rent and afford to stay in their home – and that still rings true for a lot of locals here in the Harbour city.

“Our listings represent less than one per cent of Sydney’s housing supply. Of those that are listed on the platform, the overwhelming majority are primary residences rented just a few days a month. “

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[Millie]

Gee Airbnb/Stayz etc have a hard time.  Academics, social commentators, San Francisco’s Financial Controllers, and even the Australian Bureau of Criminality all come up with data which Airbnb’s marketing gurus constantly claim is faulty. 

I for one don’t know of a single jurisdiction anywhere where Airbnb is working openly with legislators; quite the reverse.  They were roundly criticised in a 2015 Federal Inquiry into tax avoidance.

We already have legislation which prohibits short-term lets in our Strata buildings – our NSW Legislation, backed up by case law (Land and Environment Court).  

The NSW Parliamentary Hearing Committee didn’t identify one single fault with our legislation.  What was very evident:  every local government representative who appeared before the Hearing Committee admitted that they hadn’t followed through on a single complaint from their constituents about short-term letting.  Shameful.

Watching Neighbours Not Strangers Facebook page (they work with data supplied by Murray Cox’s Inside Airbnb), last week’s figures on the number of Airbnb/Stayz rentals as opposed to properties available for rent to tenants in prime areas of Sydney and elsewhere, it’s obvious tenants are pushed out so that tourists can move in.  It’s a disaster. 

No wonder Airbnb – worth in excess of USD30 billion – is so eager to peddle their spin and protect their “penetration” into our residential housing:

City of Sydney: 6,012 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 1,030 homes on Domain

Waverley:  4,532 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 388 homes on Domain

Randwick:  2,657 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 501 homes on Domain

Woollahra:  1,333 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 247 homes on Domain

Warringah: 1,268 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 318 homes on Domain

Byron: 2,306 homes on Airbnb/Stayz, 61 homes on Domain

Our Strata Manager/Strata Committee left us in no doubt this week; given the possibility to vote to pass a by-law on this issue, they will vote in a by-law which allows our building to be advertised again on hundreds of websites as a  cheap/budget hotel, motel, serviced apartments, backpackers lodge…

Residential housing is for residents. Investors can and always have rented their properties…to tenants.  That goes for home/flat-shares also. 

JimmyT, keep up your reporting.  There seems to be so much media on Airbnb which suspiciously resemble ‘Cash for Comment’ and we simply don’t have a voice.

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