Property journalist, Brett Thomas, has neatly explained why short-term rental platforms like Airbnb are exacerbating Australia’s rental crisis:
Data tracking company airdna monitors 11,043 Airbnb listings in Sydney, of which 71% are entire homes. In Melbourne, it monitors 15,526 dwellings, 82% of which are entire homes.
Another data tracking service, Inside Airbnb, reports that average annual income for recent and frequently booked short-term rental homes in Sydney is $36,966, or $709.73 a week, which compares favourably to the current median weekly rent of $620.
In Melbourne, average annual income for frequently booked Airbnb homes is $31,402, or $603.88 per week, significantly higher than the city’s median weekly rent of $460.
But here’s the kicker. In both cities, these in-demand properties are occupied less than 50% of the year. At the same time, long-term rental vacancy rates in Sydney and Melbourne remain at low levels, 1.5% and 1.7% respectively, according to SQM Research…
Curbed recently reported that New York had more Airbnb listings than apartments for rent:
There are now bidding wars for one in every five Manhattan rental apartments (and one in three luxury units), according to the most recent Douglas Elliman report. Inventory in all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and northwest Queens has been hovering well below 10,000 units — as of April, the number was just 7,669. Which is several thousand less than the number of entire-apartment and entire-home Airbnb rentals available in New York City right now: 10,572, according to AirDNA, a third-party site that tracks short-term rentals. Inside Airbnb, another site that scrapes Airbnb for listings data, puts the number even higher, at 20,397.
Ever since Airbnb came on the scene in 2008, there have been concerns that the short-term-rental company would deplete the housing stock by sucking up available rooms, causing prices to rise in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there were already severe housing shortages.
The below table from SQM Research shows there were only 11,943 homes listed for rent in Sydney and 10,413 in Melbourne in July:
This compares to “11,043 Airbnb listings in Sydney, of which 71% are entire homes” and “15,526 dwellings, 82% of which are entire homes” across Melbourne.
So, there are roughly an equal number of homes for long-term rent across Sydney as there are Airbnbs, and there are more Airbnbs in Melbourne than long-term rentals, according to these figures.
This is obviously a back of the envelope analysis and does not take account of overlap between the two sets.
Regardless, it does suggest that short-term rentals like Airbnb are having a significant impact on the rental market and are worsening Australia’s acute shortage of rental homes.
