It's definitely impacted Dublin, where I live, and the rest of Ireland. There's 10x more rooms on AirBnB than there are long-term rents in Dublin; in other parts of the country it's 100x.
Can confirm it's a mess in Dublin, and it doesn't help that a significant amount of the politicians are themselves landlords so it's in their interests to keep the status-quo.
I'm glad I left and wont look back but whenever I need to travel back for whatever reason I have to crash at a friends place because the cost of an airbnb or hotel is simply extortion.
Is that "10x more rooms on AirBnB then there are open rental ads in Dublin"? Surely there aren't literally 10x more rooms on AirBnB then there are renters in Dublin?
I am also very frustrated at rental markets in many place, though I'm still unsure how much of this is merely displacing hotels/hostels relative to actually sucking up long-term rental slots.
I am very prepared to lay a lot of blame on Airbnb for high prices, just haven't seen anything conclusive (US-centric stuff I've seen, the fact that building has crawled to a halt feels way more relevant)
Yes, 10x more rooms on AirBnB than open rooms to rent in Dublin. At least with single bedrooms; I haven't looked into more rooms as I'm only searching for a new place for myself.
> though I'm still unsure how much of this is merely displacing hotels/hostels relative to actually sucking up long-term rental slots.
It very much is happening. Dublin saw this during the pandemic, when the long-term rent market doubled after tourism was shut down. These are houses that are zoned for residents, not people coming in, and landlords see they can easily make more money letting them out to the tourists.
> Pre-Covid there were more than 5,000 homes in Dublin available to tourists via Airbnb alone.
Dublin has a population of over 1.5 million. On average, a dwelling in Dublin has 2.5 people. 5000 AirBnB's account for less than 1% of the total housing stock.
I constantly hear about people complaining about how short term rentals are running the housing market but the numbers never add up.
It may be 1% of total housing stock but what is it relative to long term rental stock? It wouldn't take much to have a significant effect on the cost of long term rentals.
Google says that 30% of the population is renting in Ireland, I imagine that it's a bit higher in Dublin... but yeah. I think it's reasonable to say there's an effect.
I don't think that it is the primary effect, but we can walk and chew bubblegum!
Hotels were one of the few ways multi-unit residential buildings could get past the ubiquitous pests known as nimbys. Moving from hotels to airbnbs is going to reduce density in many places.
In Vancouver its build build build and the investors buy buy buy. You need to make the new build available for people who want to live in them. Simply building more is not enough. Vancouver proves that in spades.
In Vancouver every new unit that is built rents for more than the cities median rent, meaning for every new unit built, rents go up overall. How that is supposed to help with "Affordability" is beyond me.
Until they instituted an un-occupancy tax, many of those units weren't even rented. Local Vancouver businesses were getting killed by big buildings that should have lots of tenants being ghost towns. It reminded me of a mostly empty Beijing apartment building.
Just go to AirBnB and check -- right now, there are over 1000 open rooms for one guest in Dublin. Going to daft.ie, Ireland's main rental site, there's only 200 one-bed places to let (and that includes one room open in otherwise occupied houses). An order of magnitude difference, and it'll get worse throughout the summer.
It's a cancer that has directly impacted and caused the skyrocketing of prices and constraint of supply. The answer isn't to (just) build more, but to end the exploitation from AirBnB.
Why isn't the answer to build more? Of course that's the answer.
Clearly there's demand for tourists to come and visit Dublin, maybe they should either tax the tourists into not coming (and hit the economy), or build enough room for everybody?
It's definitely doable, but it's far from simple, and is going to further change the character of the city. And involve a lot of public spending which people object to.
We have oodles of room. Every human - not families, but individual humans, including children - can get their own massive house, with a big back yard.
Here's my math:
Back yard size: 15x40m = 600 sq m.
Public amenities per person = 300 sq m. (very generous)
Total space per human = 900 sq m. = 9e-4 sq km.
Number of humans = 8e9
Land required for this most ultimate of suburbs: 7.2e6 sq km
Surface area of Canada: 9.98e6 sq km. USA: 9.83e6 sq km.
In my absolutely absurdly overprovisioned scenario, we all fit in 72% of the admittedly very large Canada. ALL of us. Leaving plenty of room for every holiday-worthy place on earth to have all the AirBnBs and apartment-hotels needed.
> It's expensive
Investing public money to create amenities for tourism is going to be an economic no-brainer. Tourists, visitors, and locals will all benefit from it.
> Character will change
Everything changes all the time. The history of the world is a story of the character of things changing, whether happily or otherwise.
In a time of great change, desperately trying to slow it down isn't the way. Rolling with, and even initiating, the changes in an authentic way is much better.
There is room - in the hotels. Tourists aren't entitled to live in local houses. And I never said to not build more. I said it's only part of the answer.
You are 100% correct. The only solution is to completely ban them from operating in the country or make it economically unviable for landlords via the taxation system.
What you meant is there are 10x as many rooms available on AirBnB than are one-bed places to let. That's very different from:
> There's 10x more rooms on AirBnB than there are long-term rents in Dublin;
AirBnB places would have high turnover, probably an order of magnitude higher than long term rentals. It makes perfect sense that more of the former would be vacant at any given time.
Yea, but when there are single digit numbers of family house rentals in Meath on done deal, something is wrong.
When there’s 100 people applying for rentals. Or people moving from Blanch to South Wexford or Carlow because that’s the closest they can afford. Rents have doubled or tripled in the last 10 years.
We bought 5 years back when we couldn’t find a rental, rents were 1400 for a 3/4 be then, we got 1600 3 years ago when we were away for a year, and comps now are 2500+, in a place with a 1.5 hr commute to Dublin.
It doesn't change the underlying issue. The issue is every single one of those rooms available on AirBnB is a room/house not available for long-term rent. And that's the problem. It's just as big an issue that there's 10x more one-bed rooms on AirBnB than there are one-bed places to let.
Imagine if new construction was allowed. Then you could build more, and have both one home for AirBnB and another for long term rent. Have your cake and eat it, too.
1% of housing stock is misleading. Generally speaking, a 3% rental vacancy rate is considered healthy. Effectively, AirBnB is consuming 1/3 of the total available rental pool if it consumes 1% of housing stock.
I'm glad I left and wont look back but whenever I need to travel back for whatever reason I have to crash at a friends place because the cost of an airbnb or hotel is simply extortion.