"Illegal hotels at the expense of housing": the truth about Airbnb in Sydney

Looking through Sydney's Airbnb listings, the cities of Paris, London, Melbourne, New York and Hong Kong have more than 36,500 locations.

Sydney residents opened their doors and even their backyard to Airbnb, with a dozen tents, a hammock near Rockdale swaying at $ 25 per night and a poolside shed in Collaroy costing about $ 72 per night.

The home sharing platform, which declined to comment on this story, does not share its SEO data but an Australian, Murray Cox, has opened a window on the company's business by removing the website and making it available on Inside Airbnb.

Cox said he found that most Airbnb listings were whole houses and apartments, many of which were permanently rented.

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"The data has dispelled the myth of home sharing and highlighted the fact that commercial operators were turning their investment properties into illegal hotels at the expense of valuable housing for residents," Cox said.

Allowing homeowners to convert their properties into hotels, "turns a city into a playground for millionaires and vacationers," he said.

The top five Airbnb hosts in Sydney have more than 100 listings, headed by Sabrina with 197 properties and Abode Accommodation Specialist with 176 seats.

Laurence Troy, Housing Policy Expert at UNSW, co-authored a study last year that nearly one in seven rental properties in the popular suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne were now Airbnbs.

Troy said the short-term rentals had had a "concentrated impact" in Sydney around Bondi, Manly and Darlinghurst and had called for increased transparency from Airbnb.

An badysis by Sydney Morning Herald of Inside Airbnb data from December 2018 revealed that at least 1,000 properties were listed in nine suburbs of Sydney, but one in three listings has never been reviewed by a guest. No comments can indicate that a property has not been rented before.

The top 10 suburbs to appear were: Sydney (CBD) 9241, Waverley 5467, Randwick 3346, Manly 1800, Warringah 1794, Woollahra 1573, North Sydney 1370, Marrickville 1252, Pittwater 1192 and Leichhardt 999.

The average price of an Airbnb in Sydney was NZD 216 per night, more than Paris ($ 184), London ($ 213), Melbourne ($ 154), New York ($ 213) and Hong Kong ($ 165) .

Tracey McArdle, who has facilitated short-term leasing in Sydney since the 1980s, said she had resisted Airbnb as long as she could.

"It's terrible, they bring down prices [because] they have over-supplied the market, "she said. It's a very scary thing for homeowners … there are houses I rent for a period of $ 10,000 that would have cost $ 20,000 a decade ago. "

McArdle said that "short-term party tenants" had also created havoc in the industry. In Redfern, where she lives, the long-term tenants have been replaced by a stream of party goers. When she asked the owner of one of these properties why they had changed to Airbnb rentals, the answer was simple.

"The woman next to me said she did it because she can now get a week's rent in three days," McArdle said. "She could get $ 900 a week in the long run, or $ 1,200 a week in the short term."

Airbnb has been listed in the NSW Fair Trading Complaint Register twice last year, in April and October, and has received 10 formal complaints over the past two months.

A spokesman for SafeWork NSW said the new laws to regulate short-term rental service providers, pbaded in August 2018, are not expected to come into effect until the end of 2019.

"Since the adoption of the law, Fair Trading is working on the development of a mandatory code of conduct for key players in the industry," the spokesman said.