“We’ve seen what happened during Covid when there aren’t any tourists in the Airbnbs,” she says.Īfter flooding closed the Moss Vale road for months – one of only two ways into the valley – the town is banking on a bumper tourist season, and better luck in attracting new workers, once it reopens next month. In Kangaroo Valley, Natalie Harker has been following the short-term and long-term markets closely.Īs manager of Arts in the Valley – a festival beginning at the end of September – and treasurer of the Kangaroo Valley chamber of tourism and commerce, she says the town is grateful for the extra tourists that platforms such as Airbnb have brought in. “In premium locations you can make so much during the high season, it outweighs the amount you can make on a long-term rental, even if the property is sitting empty for months of the year,” she says. In popular holiday towns, short-term accommodation can be much more lucrative than a long-term lease, she says. “These platforms have provided another way the people who already own real estate to get extra flexibility in the market to use their properties to make money … They’re thinking, ‘I might get a second or third property now because of these short-term accommodation platforms’,” she says. “Knowing they can very easily make money when they’re not using that holiday home is giving them reason to buy it, and that could be at the expense of a local who can’t pay as much for a house. Even a modest reduction in Airbnb listings was associated with a significant reduction in rents, the research found.Ĭrommelin, whose research has included interviewing owners who rent their properties through Airbnb, says the knowledge that it is a reliable source of income is contributing to some wealthier capital city residents’ decisions to buy regional properties. She points to research from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute tracking changes in rent in Sydney, Hobart and the Shoalhaven during the first Covid wave in 2020, which found rents fell across the board when short-term accommodation stock returned to the long-term rental market.
But she says entire home listings – where the owner does not live in the property as a host – are contributing to wider problems. She stresses that other factors would continue to restrict the rental market even if platforms such as Airbnb were to disappear overnight. You don’t need many Airbnb listings to have a real impact on how the community functions,” she says. “Smaller housing markets have very little flexibility, especially tourist towns. The Kangaroo Valley Fudge House and Ice Creamery has closed due to staffing issues.
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