The increasingly important role Airbnb plays in the UK property has been exposed following a recent Sunday Times investigation, and now questions are now being asked within the property sector about the true aims of the business, which started out as a way for home owners to make money from short term lets.

“Short-term lets are undoubtedly playing an increasingly important role in the UK’s housing mix, and websites such as Airbnb make perfect sense for landlords who need to fill their property fast for a short period between tenancies,” says Richard Price, Executive Director of UKALA.

“However, the emergence of Airbnb has rightly raised questions about the role they should play in the wider lettings market; after all, with demand for houses at an all-time high the last thing anyone needs is right now are rented homes taken out of circulation.”

The Sunday Times also revealed that a significant number of short-let management companies have sprung up specialising in the management of Airbnb properties on behalf of landlords. Several suggested to the paper’s reporters that UK planning laws, which usually restrict rental periods to 90 days, are easy to break and poorly policed by local authorities.

“The most important thing is to make sure that property rentals are legal and undertaken responsibly. There are thousands of letting agents in the UK who already provide a great service to landlords and tenants, and while internet platforms such as Airbnb can supplement that experience, they won’t be able to provide the security and peace of mind that comes with employing a UKALA member,” says Richard Price.

“If landlords choose to use services such as Airbnb there is no reason why it couldn’t be partnered with the services of a professional UKALA agent employed to manage the tenancy – that way everyone would benefit from the best of both worlds.”

Airbnb also offers landlords the ability to manage multiple properties via its online suite and the site is clearly keen to persuade landlords to rent out properties on a more professional level via its platform. A marketing email seen by The Negotiator yesterday makes it clear the site wants people to rent out ‘whole properties’, while searches on the site enable ‘guests’ to select and rent properties for more than 90 days – the usual definition of a short let – and quotes costs ‘per month’.

Also, in the US, Airbnb has launched an initiative to offer landlords additional revenue share if they rent out multiple properties within a building. But the big worry in the UK is that Airbnb rentals like this are outside the regulatory framework as well as quietly bypassing letting agents. Because Airbnb rentals are deemed short lets they are not covered by the UK’s property safety or eviction laws, for example.

The Guardian newspaper has also recently reported on the problems Airbnb can cause. It says that city centres are becoming increasingly ‘sanitised’ as properties that would have been let or owned by young renters or first time buyers are snapped up to be professionally let via Airbnb. Reporters visited Amsterdam where the ‘Airbnb effect’ is said to be the most obvious in Europe. There some some 22,000 rooms and flats are available to rent on the site and it is said one in six property owners within the city’s most popular neighbourhoods use the service.