AirBnB: When sharing isn’t caring

By Tim Thorlby

12 min read

This blog explores the rise of AirBnb, the property sharing website, and the impact it has had on many communities. As owners flip their properties from housing long term tenants to seeking profits from short term rentals, who are the winners and losers? The blog focuses on the plight of tourist hotspots in the UK. It builds on my previous blog on rentier capitalism and offers a case study of rentierism in action.

1 – “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside!”

There is a housing crisis in the UK. As our population continues to rise, housebuilding has failed to keep up and social housing has been disembowelled by the Right to Buy, with the result that we have intense competition for housing of all kinds. There are high and rising prices in the private sector and long waiting lists for social housing. It’s grim for many, particularly the younger generation (‘Generation Rent’).

Nowhere is the housing crisis more acute than in the nation’s tourist hotspots – places like Devon and Cornwall, our National Parks and almost anywhere by the sea. These areas have the added pressure of a holiday industry competing for properties. The result is that local families are being priced out of their own communities by absentee landlords who are collectively making significant profits.

We have become used to stories of ‘ghost villages’ where winter reveals how few residents actually now live in these communities. The bustling towns full of happy tourists have rents that are so high that locals have to sofa-surf and schools have dwindling intakes as families are forced to move away. Whole communities are being undermined by intense competition for private housing.

This matters. The increased flipping of properties from long term rentals (to residents) to short term rentals (to tourists) is causing significant social harm in many communities. Profits are also being extracted from these areas at the same time. And there is a generational injustice as older property owners undermine the long-term aspirations of younger renters.

This blog explores how the housing aspirations of a generation are being unwittingly undermined by their parents’ generation. I am going to focus on the UK’s holiday hotspots to show how. It’s also a very good illustration of how our economy today rewards asset owners more than workers – a case study in rentier capitalism (see my last blog).

2 – How big is the holiday homes market?

It is surprisingly difficult to get comprehensive data on holiday homes in the UK, but the best recent estimate suggests that there are approximately 294,000 holiday homes in Great Britain, with 235,000 of these in England. This includes second homes (where the owner has registered it as such for council tax purposes but can also let it out) and commercial self-catering holiday lets registered for business rates[1].

To compare, research by CPRE[2] into the rise of the new web platforms AirBnB and VRBO found just over 180,000 short term lets in England in September 2019. This is whole-property lets (not just a room within an owner’s house) and includes both AirBnB and VRBO, the two biggest web platforms for short-term lets. These platforms have grown rapidly in the last decade, fell somewhat during the pandemic as tourism was constrained but are now bouncing back rapidly again and returning towards pre-pandemic levels. 

The most recent data from AirBnB in 2018[3] claimed 223,200 properties listed across the UK, including 174,500 in England. Of these 58% were whole properties, so 129,500 in the UK and an estimated 101,200 in England.

So, all this data suggests that some 43% of all whole-property holiday lets in the UK are available on AirBnB, making it easily the single biggest source of lettings in the UK.  The rest of this analysis therefore focuses primarily on AirBnB because it is by far the largest such platform in the UK. 

3 – What is AirBnB?

AirBnB was founded in 2008 by three friends in San Francisco. It is a web platform that enables property owners (‘Hosts’) to rent out their properties to others – either just a room or the whole property – in order to earn extra income. The company takes a fee from each booking, acting as a broker between Hosts and guests.

It has grown to encompass over 4 million Hosts across more than 220 countries and has served millions of guests, and the company is still growing. The firm estimates that over $180 billion income has been taken by Hosts over the last 15 years.

AirBnB’s aim (in their own words) is to promote ‘sustainable and diversified tourism’ through ‘people-powered hospitality’, in what they call ‘the age of the sharing economy’. The view of AirBnB is that their service supports tourism and the creation of jobs in those areas, benefits travellers by giving them more choice of accommodation and also enables ordinary home-owners to earn more income from their properties.

In December 2020, the company was floated on the US Stock Exchange. Their shares doubled in value on the first day, valuing the company at over $100 billion. The founders became billionaires.

Other companies have sought to follow suit over the years, including Booking.com, Homeaway, House Trip and VRBO, so there are now several providers. More traditional short-term holiday letting companies also still carry on business, letting out cottages and apartments, and some of these have upped their online game too.

AirBnB in the UK

AirBnB has been operating in the UK since 2009. In just over a decade it has grown from nothing to become the largest holiday lettings platform in the country.

The geographical distribution of AirBnb properties is very uneven, with strong concentrations in particular regions and cities. Some 75% were listed in just four regions - London, the South East, South West and Scotland – although there were listings in every region.

On average, Hosts earned a median income of £3,100 each per year for an average of 36 nights per year, so c£86 per night, 2018 prices.

4 – Why does this matter?

The case of AirBnB and the rise of short-term lets in the UK is a clear example of rentier capitalism in action – the monopoly exploitation of assets for income and profit.

Across many of our coastal and countryside towns and villages, local families are being priced out of their own communities by absentee landlords who are collectively making significant profits, enabled by a global tech platform which is making mind-boggling profits. Homes which used to be available for locals to rent have been turned into holiday homes and there are real winners and losers.

The winners are the UK’s wealthier households who own second homes and holiday homes and can use these property assets to generate income. The losers are the nation’s renters, younger and poorer, who are priced out of a home. Geographically, as many of these properties are owned by absentee landlords, the process also sees a significant transfer of money out of these communities to other places. Whole communities are being hollowed out and exploited for profit.

AirBnB started as a small, friendly ‘sharing’ platform – few would have an issue with the renting out of a room or the sharing of a family home whilst on holiday. This is arguably ‘good sharing’, with no obvious losers. But the platform (and others like it) has become strongly business-oriented. The majority of letting is whole-properties, not single rooms, and the majority of properties are owned by Hosts who own multiple properties and for whom letting is a business, not sharing. This is all perfectly legal, but it has led to a growing negative impact in the areas where it operates. 

The biggest issue is clearly the flipping of long-term rentals to short term rentals, reducing the supply of private rented properties and increasing the prices for those that remain as people compete for the dwindling number of homes. This is most acute in our holiday communities, where the longer term overlapping issue of second homes is also prevalent too.

It's perhaps worth saying here, for the avoidance of doubt, that there is nothing wrong with owning a second home or a holiday home, the issue here is that the rational actions of individuals, when added together, are cumulatively causing significant distress, albeit unintended.

I won’t repeat my critique of rentier capitalism here, but there are two key culprits here:

• AirBnB as a tech platform needs regulating – AirBnB has enabled individuals and companies to do business with no thought for the impact. It has no incentive to slow its own growth and clearly cannot regulate itself. It is in a powerful position and has abused this power to enable a process which is enriching a minority at the expense  of others. There is a strong case now for the regulation of short-term lettings in the UK to protect the interests of renters.

• Government fiscal policy – As discussed elsewhere, we have a national system of taxation which positively encourages rentier behaviours amongst property owners; there are tax reliefs and advantages for holiday lets but not for long-term rentals, mortgages for holiday let properties carry tax relief, buying second homes brings few financial penalties, income from wealth/assets is taxed less than income from work, etc. There is a strong case to use our taxation to incentivise fairer behaviours and tax wealth at least at the same level as work. There is nothing wrong with owning a second home or letting out a holiday home in itself, but as a society we cannot prioritise these activities over the provision of homes for renters and the development of local communities.

In the next sections I draw together the evidence for the impact of AirBnB and similar platforms on our communities. The blog finishes with thoughts on how we might do better.

5 - Assessing impact: winners and losers

How can we begin to assess the impact of AirBnB? There are five main groups of stakeholders to think about. Here they are, together with a brief verdict on how they fare, as winners or losers:

• 1 ) Property owners (‘Hosts’) – There are two quite distinct groups of owners here. Firstly, there are people who own their own homes and just let out a room or let out their house for a short time whilst on holiday. This is really where AirBnB started and you can fairly think of this as ‘sharing’. Today, this kind of activity is very much in the minority. The second and much larger group of owners on AirBnB are those who let out whole properties – often multiple properties - for longer periods or for the whole year. The amount of income earned clearly varies a lot, and not all Hosts are successful in hiring out their spaces, but a significant amount of income has been earned by property owners overall. It is important to note that the winners here are all existing property owners and the biggest winners are those who let out whole properties – the vast majority of whom are in the top half of the UK wealth distribution[4]. Verdict: mostly winners!

• 2) Guests – These are the paying customers who choose to stay in AirBnB properties for their holidays or business travel. Millions have people have chosen to use this service over the last few years and judging by the ratings (both Hosts and Guests rate each other), most are pretty happy. Prices are also sometimes lower than hotels, although not always (as at peak times). AirBnB gives people more of a choice about where to stay and for those wanting a ‘home from home’, it works well. Verdict: mostly winners!   

• 3) AirBnb company shareholders – The company provides a peer-to-peer platform and earns its income by charging 3% to Hosts for every booking and 5-15% to every Guest. In 2021, the company earned $6 billion in fees. Given that it has relatively few overheads (it doesn’t own any of the properties, so there are no roofs to fix) it is a highly profitable model; in 2021, it had a gross profit margin of over 80%. Today the company is valued at $73 billion and the business continues to grow. Verdict: definitely winners!

• 4) Hotels & competitors – Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rest of the hospitality sector is less keen on the disruptive arrival of AirBnB, not least as they feel that AirBnB Hosts have unfair advantages – they normally do not charge VAT or pay business rates and are not subject to the same Health and Safety requirements, etc. The evidence suggests that it has indeed impacted on the hotel sector through reduced demand and has put a downward pressure on prices. However, some of the AirBnB activity is actually supplementary to the traditional hospitality sector (i.e. stays that would not have happened in a hotel) so the impacts are somewhat complex in nature[5]. Verdict: mostly losers

• 5) Local communities – This is complicated. There are four bits to this:

  • Local councils - Local councils are losing tax income. When a property flips from being a home or a second home (paying council tax) into short-term letting where it is let out for more than 70 days per year then it registers as a business but immediately qualifies for 100% small business rates relief, so no local tax is paid.  Verdict: losers

  • Neighbours – Although much hosting is problem-free, there are clearly ‘neighbour issues’ in some popular areas where houses are used for parties and result in anti-social behaviour and noise. Verdict: some are losers

  • Local economic impact - There is the potential for an increase in lettings to boost local tourism, helping to create jobs and prosperity in the local area. This however assumes a high level of occupancy, as empty houses benefit no-one, and there is also some evidence of a loss of employment in other parts of the hospitality sector (e.g. hotels), so this needs a bit more analysis; we are going to explore this below. Verdict: mixed

  • Local housing impact - Finally, and most challenging of all, there is growing evidence that the flipping of a large number of properties from long term rental to short term rental is highly damaging for the affordability and availability of private rented housing for local people. This is analysed in more detail below. Verdict: losers

As you can see, the property owners and users of AirBnB are the main winners but the local communities and councils are the main losers, picking up the costs. The next section takes a deeper look at the key issue of housing impact, and then we take a brief look at the economic impact.

6 – Digging Deeper: The impact of AirBnB on housing

AirBnB enables property owners to easily flip entire properties from long term lets in the private rented sector (homes for people to rent and live in) to short term lets (for travellers) in the hope of increasing their income. What impact does this have?

6.1 - Are there less homes available for long-term rent?

AirBnB has clearly grown massively in the last decade, but does this mean that there has been an overall increase in homes shifting from renting to short term letting? After all, second homes and holiday lets are not new.

As we noted above, comprehensive data on this is surprisingly hard to obtain. However, the weight of evidence clearly suggests that short term lets have indeed increased substantially in the last decade and at the expense of longer term renting. Key evidence includes:

• The English Homes Survey shows that second home ownership in the UK has almost doubled from 2008-2018, much of which is used for holiday lets

• The number of homes registered as commercial holiday lets, (i.e. requiring business rates registration with their local council), increased by 40% in England from 2018 - 2021[6]

• Recent surveys of landlords in the UK have confirmed the practice of flipping properties. A national survey of private landlords in Great Britain in 2019[7] identified that 23% were involved in short-term letting as part or all of their activity and that over half of these had flipped properties from long term lets to short term lets. They estimated that this was 46,000 properties, or 0.9% of all private rented properties in Britain. They also found many landlords considering doing this more in the future; possibly another 200,000 – 470,000 properties being lost to longer term tenancies – ie up to 8.7% of the country’s private rented stock.

• Research in Scotland[8] highlighted that AirBnB activity was mainly whole-property, often by owners who had multiple properties (so, businesses) and that at least 36% of AirBnB properties had previously been used for long-term letting or family homes.

Therefore, there is little doubt that the flipping of properties into short-term letting is a growing problem across the UK. This finding is also strongly underpinned by the evidence presented next, about the wider impacts on the private rented sector.

6.2 – Does the growth of short-term letting impact on private rents?

This is a much harder and more complex question to answer, but studies are now available from across the world which show clear links between the growth of short-term rentals and increasing private rental prices in those areas. It may seem obvious to some, but there is evidence to support the idea now.

A study published in 2020 which looked at data from across the USA found that AirBnB did indeed reduce the supply of long-term rentals available and also had a measurable impact on both house prices and rental prices in the most affected areas. This study estimated that a 10% increase in AirBnB listings in a neighbourhood leads to a 0.2% increase in rental prices and 0.3% increase in house prices[9].

Another American study in 2019 by the University of Massachusetts Boston Department of Economics found that with every increase of 12 Airbnb listings per census tract, asking rents increased by 0.4%[10].

Multiple studies have found similar impacts in other cities in other countries. For example, a study in Barcelona suggested that areas with high AirBnB activity added up to 7% to private rental prices[11].

Closer to home, a study on London published in 2021[12] found that AirBnB listings had risen to 80,000 in this one city alone (2.38% of the total housing supply). The study found listed properties in 82% of Greater London’s neighbourhoods – very widespread, although with more significant concentrations in inner and central London. In the most popular central neighbourhoods, up to 23% of all properties were listed on AirBnB. Quite staggering.

The London study also found strong evidence of the misuse of AirBnB. In London, planning laws do not allow short term lets for more than 90 days per year without permission, yet a significant number of listings were available for more than 90 days– and this was most likely to be found in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of private rented properties. The study estimated that over 10% of the listings were available for more than 90 days, and in some areas (eg in Westminster, Camden, Hackney), up to 7.5% of all of the properties in some neighbourhoods were not only AirBnB listed but listed for more than 90 days.

And what about the property agents on the frontline of lettings? A UK wide survey of lettings agents in 2022[13] explored their views on short term lets and found that “lettings agents overwhelmingly agree that it will negatively impact the PRS [private rented sector] through a reduction in supply of quality accommodation and pressure on rents.”

So, there is not much doubt that a significant amount of short-term letting in a neighbourhood makes private renting more expensive.

6.3 - Case Study: Devon

We can use the county of Devon as a case study to illustrate the impact of short-term rentals on a typical holiday area.

The CPRE study (noted in Section 2 above) provided a geographical breakdown of short-term rentals of whole properties. Their data for Devon[14] showed an 800% increase in short term rentals in just four years, from 2016 to 2020. Drawing all of our data together, I estimate that the total number of holiday homes in Devon was 12,870 in 2020.

This is equivalent to nearly 11% of the entire private rented sector in the county or 2.3% of all residential properties in Devon. It is also equivalent to over half of the county’s social housing waiting list of 24,000 households. It is a huge amount of housing.

If we apply the impact metrics derived by Barron et al in their 2020 USA study to the increases seen in Devon, it suggests that from 2016 to 2020, AirBnB and similar short term rentals may have added 16% to private rental prices in addition to other market forces.

7 – Digging Deeper: the impact of AirBnB on the local economy

As a short detour, I also want to briefly ponder whether short-term lets are actually working well from an economic viewpoint. This is clearly the driver for owners (‘I will be better off’) and often the justification given by AirBnB and some of its supporters (‘think of the benefits for local tourism’) but I do not believe that the evidence is so clear.

7.1 – Are owners really better off?

Clearly, the nightly rates you can charge a short-term guest are almost double the nightly rates you receive from a long-term tenant, hence lots of owners have been piling into the short term rental sector. It’s obvious, surely? But this sum only works for you if you can achieve a good level of occupancy. Longer term tenants may pay less per day but they usually give an owner a reliable income through ongoing occupancy, all year round.

A study in Manchester[15] suggested that owners doing short term lets would need occupancy levels of 50% or more in order to earn more income than they could secure via a long-term rental to a traditional tenant in the same neighbourhood.

A brief analysis of occupancy data for Devon, sourced from Airbtics[16] gave an average occupancy rate of only 50% over the last 12 months for all whole-property listings. This is one of the busiest holiday destinations in the UK. This suggests that a substantial number of owners are earning less each year than if they were engaged in long term rental. This needs further research, but it is clear from occupancy data that not all landlords are better off in the short-term market where their occupancy rates are not consistently high.

7.2 – Are homes often empty?

Occupancy rates clearly suggest that outside of holiday seasons it is likely that many properties are indeed empty. Together with the above finding that not all landlords are better off in the short-term rental market anyway, there is case for saying that perhaps there are too many properties in this market. With occupancy levels of only 50%, it is hardly an efficient use of housing in the midst of a housing crisis. No wonder Generation Rent are so angry.

7.3 - Are local businesses better off?

AirBnB state that their average UK guest spends £100 per day (presumably over and above the cost of their accommodation). All other things being equal, we would expect tourists to have a positive economic impact on the areas that they visit due to the impact of their spending – creating jobs, etc.  However, if the tourists are displacing residents (rather than adding to them), then the sums do not work nearly so well.  

For example – taking AirBnB’s simple rule of thumb for a guest spending £100 per day. Assuming we have a one bed flat in Devon and it is occupied 50% of the year (matching the average occupancy) then we might expect the successive tourists staying there to spend £18,250 per year in the area, over and above accommodation costs.

If that one bed flat had previously been the home of a single tenant earning a typical Devon annual income of £30,002 (2022, median annual pay), my own estimate[17] is that he or she would probably have spent over £12,700 per year in the local economy. This is just £5,500 less than the tourist.

The additional local economic benefit of tourism may therefore be two-thirds smaller than that implied by AirBnB – i.e. closer to c£5,500 per year per bedspace, rather than £18,250.

Clearly this is just an indicative ‘back of the envelope’ comparison but it makes the point that the economic benefits of tourism are greatly undermined if short-term letting is displacing long term residents rather than adding to them. Traditionally, holiday accommodation such as hotels, B&Bs and self-catering homes would have required planning permission and been additional to local residential accommodation. It would be great to see further in-depth research on this point; Government and local authorities cannot simply accept the economic benefits of short-term lets as a given.

8 – The Future: how can we better manage short-term lets?

Across the world, different countries have chosen to manage the arrival of AirBnB differently from almost no regulation at all (like the UK) through to much stricter arrangements. For example, some of the most common management tools include the following:

• No-go zones - Some cities have specified geographical zones where short-term rentals are banned altogether – e.g. Amsterdam, Vienna

• Permission required - Some cities require property owners to seek permission before using their property in this way – e.g. Berlin

• Limits - Some cities have limited the number of nights that a property can be used for short-term lets – eg 30 days in Amsterdam, 90 days in London (under planning laws)

• Local tax – Some cities levy additional taxes which Hosts are required to collect and pay on to government – e.g. 21% rental income tax in Rome

London was the first part of the UK to bring in some partial restrictions on the use of short term lets, with a cap of 90 days per year for whole-property lettings now set by the Mayor of London (through planning powers) unless an owner secures planning permission for more. It is debatable how well this is working as it is clearly being widely flouted today.

The Scottish Government has just introduced a new licencing law in October 2022, which empowers local authorities to set up schemes that would require owners to secure permission before engaging in any short term lets. This will allow the market to be measured and managed.

The Welsh Government has also just brought in changes, strengthening planning powers for local authorities, introducing a licencing scheme and also enabling councils to charge 300% council tax on second homes. 

As for England? Well, not much is happening. Outside of London there is currently almost no regulation at all. Local authorities have planning powers in theory, but they are almost impossible to enforce, so amount to little[18].

A good example of what could be done is the new Short-term and Holiday-let Accommodation (Licensing) Bill which had its first reading in Parliament in December 2022, led by Rachael Maskell MP (Labour MP for York Central). This would introduce a new licencing scheme to enable local authorities to manage short-term rentals, limit the number of days they could operate for, police their usage, ban them in designated zones and allow greater local taxation of them. It hands some power back to local communities. Sadly, the Government has so far indicated it will not support the Bill so it has little chance of becoming law. The Government is promoting its own light-touch registration scheme, which would improve the monitoring of short-term lets but (crucially) not actually provide any powers to manage or limit them.

More widely, as discussed above, there is a good case for amending our taxation system so that it does not incentivise the use of a property for business above its use as a home. There are various tax reliefs that could be done away with or equalised.

Final Note

Picking apart how our economic system works is a big job, but it is important because there are real winners and losers. This blog has attempted to lift the lid on one sector. If this motivates you then get involved:

• You can learn more about how to help young renters through Generation Rent

• You can write to your MP if you want to see regulation of the likes of AirBnB

• You can keep reading on how rentier capitalism is a problem to be tackled

• You can share this blog and discuss this with your friends and colleagues; we need to talk about these issues!

This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. If you found it interesting, you can subscribe for free alerts for future blogs.

Notes

[1] For Great Britain, 2021: 95,000 commercial holiday lets plus 199,000 estimated second homes used for holiday purposes. Data drawn from: Wilson Craw, D (2022) Your Holiday, Our Home?, Generation Rent.

[2] CPRE (2022) Short Term Lets Analysis; their analysis draws on data from AirDNA plus other sources

[3] AirBnB (2018) AirBnB UK Insights Report  | Access here: https://www.airbnbcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AirbnbUKInsightsReport_2018.pdf

[4] Gardiner, L (2017) Homes Sweet Homes – the rise of multiple property ownership, Resolution Foundation  |  Access here:  https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/homes-sweet-homes-the-rise-of-multiple-property-ownership-in-britain/

[5] Numerous studies have assessed impact on the hospitality sector. This is one example from 2018, published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/how-airbnb-has-affected-the-hotel-industry.htm

[6] BBC analysis and report 29 June 2022: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61966359

[7] Capital Economics (2021) The impact of short term lets, Propertymark. Their national survey of 1000 private landlords in Great Britain in 2019  identified that 23% were involved in short-term letting as part or all of their activity. Of these, 12% had flipped properties from long term lets to short term lets – which is 2.7% of all private landlords in Great Britain. The study offered a conservative estimate that this could represent 46,000 properties, or 0.9% of all private rented properties in Britain, although in practice probably higher. The same survey identified that 10% of landlords were considering flipping long term lets to short terms in the future, particularly landlords with multiple properties. The study estimated that this could mean another 200,000 – 470,000 properties being lost to longer term tenancies – ie up to 8.7% of the country’s private rented stock. | Access here: https://www.propertymark.co.uk/static/0165201f-6a7e-46cb-987444e6862ab403/The-impact-of-short-term-lets.pdf

[8] The Inigo House Group (2019) Research into the impact of short-term lets on communities across Scotland, Scottish Government

[9] Barron, Kyle and Kung, Edward and Proserpio, Davide, (March 4 2020) The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb, SSRN  |  Access here: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3006832

[10] Holder, S (February 1, 2019) "The Airbnb Effect: It's Not Just Rising Home Prices", Bloomberg News

[11] Garcia-Lopez MA, Jofre-Monseny J, Martınez R, et al. (2019) Do short-term rent platforms affect housing markets? Evidence from Airbnb in Barcelona, IEB Working Paper 2019/05, Institut d’Economia de Barcelona

[12] Shabrina, Z, Arcaute, E & Batty, M (2021) Airbnb and its potential impact on the London housing market, Urban Studies 2022, Vol. 59(1) 197–221

[13] Property Mark (2022) The impact of short-term/holiday lets on UK housing

[14] The data in Table 1 summarises housing stock in Devon. Using the wider data cited in Section 2 showing that total holiday home rentals is 30% higher (including all providers), we can therefore estimate the total number of holiday homes in Devon – some 12,870 in Devon in 2020.

Figure 1: Housing in the County of Devon

Data sources: Dwellings data is from ONS Subnational dwelling stock by tenure estimates, population data are mid-year population estimates from ONS, short term lets data is from a CPRE study (2022)

[15] Hannah Berry, Rowena Davis, Isaac Rose, Andrea Sandor, Jonathan Silver and Luke Yates (2021) Short Term Rentals in Manchester: Time to Act?, Greater Manchester Tenants Union & Greater Manchester Housing Union

[16] Author accessed Airbtics 13 Feb 2023 for the county of Devon for whole-properties, averages for the last 12 months; 6114 listings, 50% occupancy as % of available nights, average monthly revenue £1727, £113 average nightly rate

[17] With an annual income of £30,002, after tax he or she would have had £24,261 disposable income. Assuming they spend 30% of their income on housing costs, that leaves £16,982 to spend each year. If we assume 75% is spent in the local area, allowing a generous 25% for holidays and spending elsewhere, that leaves an estimated £12,737 per year spent in the local economy.

[18] Property owners require planning permission for a ‘change of use’ from a residential property to one that is primarily used for short-term letting (i.e. it ceases to be a family home). Such changes of use are clearly happening on a significant scale, but few owners are seeking planning permission and enforcement by local authorities is almost impossible because the web platforms do not provide precise data about addresses or the nature of the lettings (whether a letting is a temporary short term let by a family or a change of use).