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Housing Market

Exclusive: Rapid rise in ‘whole property’ short-let rentals on Airbnb and other sites

Report shown to The Negotiator by industry data firm Airdna reveals extraordinary rise in properties being rented out via short-let platforms.

Sheila Manchester

airbnb

A shocking new report shown to The Negotiator reveals a rapid growth in the use of short-let websites such as Airbnb and HomeAway.com over the past 12 months in the UK.

Across the UK, 188,407 Airbnb and HomeAway listings had a booking in the month of June 2019, up 44% from the previous June. Over the same period, the number of rentals listed on the two platforms increased by 34% to 230,000, figures from Airdna show.

These figures suggest the rapidly accelerating rate at which these platforms may be sucking stock out of the traditional rental market and into the ‘unstaffed’ short-lets one.

These are classed as platforms where the landlord is directly responsible for managing the rentals including changeovers, rather than using an agency, although the figures also include properties listed by staffed agencies such as GuestReady and Hostmaker.

Whole property bookings

The Airdna research also reveals that the number of nights booked within a ‘whole property’ via these online platforms has exceeded 10 million over a 12 month period for the first time in the UK.

But the data also suggests that growth is being driven by Airbnb stealing traditional long-term rental capacity and also grabbing market share from the hospitality industry, both trends estate agents have long suspected Airbnb is driving.

Nevertheless occupancy – which has often been cited as Airbnb’s weak point in the past, is also climbing for ‘whole property’ bookings, rising from 55.2% to 68.3% over the past 12 months.

As we reported last week, one of the last acts of now former housing minister Kit Malthouse was to confirm that the government currently has no plans to further regulate short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb.

July 30, 2019

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