Update Report – January 2019 Addressing New South Wales’ Housing Crisis

Could Airbnb Be Turning Our Most Affordable Rental Housing Stock Into Ghost Hotels and Serviced Apartments?

NSW Premier Berejiklian states that she does not see our correspondence and instructed Parliamentary Hearing Committee Chairman into short-term rentals, Mark Coure MP, to schedule a meeting with representatives of Neighbours Not Strangers. At a meeting held yesterday our ‘Update Report – January 2019’ was presented.

Inside Airbnb provided the statistics in our Report. Inside Airbnb is an "independent, non-commercial, open source data tool”.

Similar recent reports to ours in other jurisdictions have received widespread Media coverage. Headlines of “Airbnb’s devastating impact on urban housing markets” in Toronto pale into insignificance in terms of lost housing in NSW.

Our NSW Ministers for Housing and Planning and Innovation and Better Regulation have consistently called for residential zoning across NSW to be set aside so that all homes may be accessed by Destination NSW and Online Travel Agencies for “tourist and event promotions, growth in key visitor markets and maximising the economic impact of visitors”.

Local Council representatives consulted by Parliamentarians advised that they had adopted a voluntary moratorium on enforcing residential zoning. Destination NSW, Airbnb and Expedia have pushed harder into our homes and communities.

A NSW Parliamentary ‘Options Paper’ writes that in 2014 an estimated 216,000 residential dwellings across NSW/ACT had been lost. Included in that number were 29,657 Airbnb listings. In the two years since the Parliamentary Inquiry, Airbnb alone has increased its listings by 119%, bringing its stock in NSW to 64,856 homes.

Airbnb will most probably dispute these figures, claiming ‘fake data’. The only statistics acceptable to Airbnb are those that it has commissioned and volunteered without peer review scrutiny to the Media and the NSW Parliament.

Homes not Hotels Communities not Transit Zones People before Profits

Neighbours not Strangers