And, hopefully, just hopefully, governments will actually step in and stop the supply from going back to AirBnB, helping alleviate some of the housing crisis in their country (I know AirBnB is a huge issue in Ireland, and several of my Irish friends are praying it fails to force all those apartments and houses back on the market; I am myself, as I'm possibly moving there this fall for a masters.)
The funniest case will be if governments don't even have to step in - I've read cases of AirBNB hosts being extremely overleveraged in their "investment" properties. With some luck, they'll be forced to sell or convert to long-term rentals (which are _very_ strongly protected where I live) to avoid defaulting on the cheap debt they gorged on.
There is, unfortunately, the risk of others doing the exactly the same thing subsequently, because they'll see this as a black swan event that will clear out the market of smaller overleveraged AirBnB "hosts", leaving them to purchase the properties in question. There are some big players, such as "The Key Collection", who are heavy users of AirBnB, with a large number of properties, as well as more legitimate properties like hotels, guesthouses, &c.
There are a few important things to keep in mind.
The Irish government has not been very good at enforcing the law around this kind of thing, and I see no reason why that should change, especially as the biggest party on the government side of the Dáil was the main party in the last government, and their records on housing (they're basically Tories) is notoriously bad. The other party in the proposed government is an ideologically similar party, and the one the caused our economy to implode due to property speculation in the 2000s.
Yeah, that is an unfortunate situation that Ireland has found itself in. I know several of the people I've talked to (most of them native Irish speakers), are really upset about it, having voted for Sinn Féin, and them getting the majority of the votes but not ending up controlling parliament.
Still, at least the outlook will hopefully be decent for me if I do move there this year (depends on how I think economy is going...and if uni's actually do open in September).
One hilarious part of all this is that I'm not strongly contemplating getting a mortgage and buying a place _purely_ on the basis that between taxes and repayments, it would cost me 2/3 the amount I currently pay in rent.