Canada: Airbnb's impact on housing more significant than expected, say market players

Short-term rental platforms are exacerbating the nation’s already alarming lack of housing supply, industry players say

By Ephraim Vecina, and first published https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/industry-trends/airbnbs-impact-on-housing-more-significant-than-expected-say-market-players/461712

Airbnb and its seemingly insatiable hunger for Canada’s residential units are major factors inflaming the ongoing housing crisis, according to Thorben Wieditz, executive director of Fairbnb Canada Network.

“Short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb have helped convert tens if not hundreds of thousands of residential units into dedicated, ghost hotel suites,” Wieditz argued in his recent contribution to The Globe and Mail.

“Units once planned, zoned, approved and built as residential have been converted to commercial space to accommodate the travelling public.”

Wieditz cited a recent report by McGill University, which estimated that approximately 17,000 housing units had been lost to rental platforms in British Columbia just this summer.

“Studies have shown repeatedly that a minority of hosts control the majority of Airbnb’s inventory and are responsible for most of the company’s revenue,” he said. “In BC, 20% of hosts are responsible for 48.8% of total revenue generated, while the top 1% of hosts – just 1,930 operators – accounted for 20.7%.”

The trend is exacerbating the nation’s already alarming lack of housing supply.

“Our inability to produce housing fast enough to accommodate new Canadians has dominated recent headlines,” Wieditz said. “Scarcity drives up costs, so the argument goes, and makes housing less attainable and affordable to those in need of long-term accommodation.”

Wieditz said that his organization continues to call for greater provincial-level oversight on these platforms “to ensure that every housing unit planned and approved as residential will not be converted into quasi-hotel use.

“The idea is simple: Establish province-wide registries for hosts to register their properties and tie them to people’s principal residences.”

Read the full article at https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/industry-trends/airbnbs-impact-on-housing-more-significant-than-expected-say-market-players/461712