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by rtpg 1125 days ago
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)

3 comments

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.

See this article from The Irish Times about it: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/pandemic-reveals...

It's only gotten worse now, too, with many going back to AirBnB.

> 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.