Back in 2012 when Airbnb was a cosy new app via which you could stay in some like-minded twenty-something’s flat on the cheap in an edgy hipster area, all while funding said jaunt by renting out your own place to another kindred spirit, I was an enthusiastic adopter.
Naively, it never occurred to me at the time that what I understood as a travel disruptor app would have such a profound impact on urban rental markets.
It didn’t take long for this magical community of charmingly imperfect real home sharers to become professionalised, blandified and extremely profitable.
A sizeable minority of private landlords switched over to short lets, taking homes out of the mainstream rental market for better yields than they could dream of from regular tenancies – the “world’s most successful Airbnb landlord” made £11.9million renting out 881 London properties in 2017.
Airbnb has hit back at claims it drives up rents and it is in no way the only factor behind London’s chronic rental crisis.
But there's no denying that some homes for longer term residents are lost when a property's main use is as a holiday let. At the start of the pandemic with travel out of the question, short lets flooded the mainstream rental market contributing to massive rent reductions in London and other popular tourist cities.
Airbnb has hit back at claims it drives up rents and it is in no way the only factor behind London’s chronic rental crisis but worrying new data suggests that thousands more London rental homes could switch from long to short lets over the next few years if current trends continue.
Almost 16,000 new listings appeared in the capital between Q4 2022 and Q3 2023 according to recent analysis of Inside Airbnb data.
Many cities are grappling with this issue: New York has banned whole-home lets of under 30 days; in Amsterdam you need a permit to offer short lets and can be fined if you break the rules; even London officially insists on a 90-day limit.
Judging by the numbers (and personal experience - have you ever had difficulty booking an Airbnb on holiday?) these attempts are not deterring people, whether they are breaking the rules or legitimately letting out their properties.
And it's not just the rental market suffering. Certainly on my own house hunt any well-located block of flats I've visited has a huge number of key safes hung outside the entrance, a sure clue to the presence of short lets.
If you live next door to a hotel I presume you expect to see a lot of tourists, but neighbours in residential areas bemoan the trundling of wheelie suitcases, erosion of community and noisy party makers next door.
Beyond spending big on a well-funded and enforced licensing scheme is the only concrete way to curb the trend.
This seems unlikely to transpire given how cash-strapped our local councils are.
But I suspect longer term the necessary shift might happen more organically.
Anecdotally, my once-enthusiastic Airbnb using peers are switching back to hotels as often the cheaper, more characterful option, while many landlords find short lets more onerous to deal with and switch back to long contracts.
It's not quite the overarching solution to the rental crisis, but it is one step towards softening the impact.
