Airbnbacklash builds from Brisbane to Barcelona

The growing global movement against Airbnb and its ilk is finally gathering momentum both here in Australia and overseas.

When rough sleeping and homelessness is at an all-time high, tenants can’t compete with tourists and there simply aren’t enough places for families to call home, it’s no surprise that people have had enough with this ‘greed before need’ monolith .

The Mayor of Brisbane is planning new regulations involving mandatory council permits for short-term holiday rentals (STHLs), restrictions on the properties that can be listed and the ability for bodies corporate to ban them altogether.

However, the new rules will require the approval of the Queensland government, and that’s a state where the Gold Coast city council has blatantly ignored its own development rules to allow STHLs in buildings that are clearly designated as residential only.

Elsewhere in Australia, according to an extensive report on the ABC website, “swathes of rental properties being taken away from local residents and the impact of the bed-based gold rush” has been revealed in a new report by property reform advocacy group Grounded.

One resident in Daylesford,  90-minutes drive from Melbourne, told the ABC the inability to secure a place to stay was driving away long-time residents, families and essential workers.

“The community health service used to get 50 applications for a job for somebody in health care that’s going to help the whole community,” Dr Mary-Faeth Chenery told the ABC. “They get two now, because there’s no place for them to stay.”

This is not a uniquely Australian problem. Barcelona in Spain is about to ban holiday rentals in as many as 10,000 residential apartments.  Meanwhile displaced local residents have turned to radical actions like soaking tourists with water pistols and blocking their exits from their hotels.

According to the Grounded report, Airbnb: from a housing problem to solution, a “cap and trade” system for short-term rental permits would eventually return hundreds of thousands of properties to the long-term rental market and still retain the profitability of short-term rentals like Airbnb and Stayz.

“We’re advocating for a cap on the number of Airbnbs and creating a licensing system that provides some sort of regulation,” Grounded managing director Karl Fitzgerald told the ABC.

Once the system was established, the licences could be auctioned. If the number was kept stable or reduced over time, the value of the licences would theoretically rise, eventually pricing many hosts out of the market.

Typically, predictably, Airbnb spin doctors said the report was based on flawed figures. As it has since the day it was created,  Airbnb won’t allow access to its data, conveniently citing privacy issues, so you have to take their word for it that the figures are “flawed”..

But the displaced permanent residents of Australia’s holiday towns know the truth. STHLs do much more harm than good and when landlords can make 80 per cent more from holiday lets, average Aussie renters have no chance.