This research looks at the prevalence and impact of low-use housing for England, Wales and Scotland. Our map of what weâve called âghost enclavesâ â the most concentrated areas of low-use properties â suggests that this is almost exclusively a coastal phenomenon. It effectively outlines the island of Great Britain in red.
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In the ghost enclaves that topped our ranking, low-use homes account for between 34% and 54% of the local housing stock. These areas include Trawsfynnydd and New Quay in Wales; St Ives, Padstow, Grasmere and Benthall in England; and Earlsferry and Millport in Scotland.
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We also interviewed 66 experts and campaigners across the UK: housing and planning officials, policy experts, campaigners, residents, councillors and politicians at local and national levels, plus trade body representatives.
They described how second homes and short-term lets have hollowed out many communities. Demand for essential services like schools has reduced as a result. Year-round social infrastructure, such as pubs and cafes, has withered due to the outsized seasonal demand followed by long fallow periods. Communities feel significant resentment.
Our findings chime with census data showing that Londoners are increasingly buying investment properties in the national parks and coastal areas of the south-west. Similarly, affluent households in the north-west of England are buying second homes in north Wales.
One planner we interviewed said any benefits from increasing housing development in rural areas (a policy that many support) â including releasing more land for housing and allowing rural exception sites, barn conversions and developments on small âpocketâ sites (such as in a garden or between houses) â are essentially cancelled out by people turning existing stock into Airbnbs, holiday lets and second homes. âAnd we have no planning control over that,â one planner explained. They likened the whole exercise to filling the bath with the plug pulled out.
Mentions Airbnb
The rise of short-term rental of entire homes is taking away much needed homes for British Columbians. Data shows that more than 16,000 entire homes are being used as short-term rentals for the majority of the year in B.C. This is making it more challenging to find affordable long-term rentals.
Many local governments have taken action to regulate short-term rentals, but enforcement of bylaws is a challenge, and they have asked the Province for more tools and resources.
The purpose of the Act is to:
- Give local governments stronger tools to enforce short-term rental bylaws
- Return short-term rental units to the long-term housing market
- Establish a new Provincial role in the regulation of short-term rentals
The Act applies to short-term rentals being offered to the public including:
- Offers hosted by a platform, where people reserve and pay for the rental service (which may include for example, Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, and FlipKey)
- Offers on other web listing forums (which may include for example, Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, and Craigslist)
- Listings in classified ads in newspapers
Deanna Steele says she has never seen as many condo and vacation homes for sale in Kelowna, B.C. as she has this month.
The founder of Keys to Kelowna Properties Inc., a luxury vacation rental management agency, said the lake-front city's real estate market is "saturated'' by properties zoned for short-term rental use. Some of the sellers are people who bought not that long ago and are already trying to get out.
"They thought they were going to make a mint because they saw what was happening in the gold rush. And now they're realizing, 'Oh, big mistake,'" said Steele.
That gold rush â investing in short-term rentals in Kelowna and many other Canadian cities â could potentially slow to a trickle in the wake of new legislation to regulate short-term rentals introduced by the B.C. government in mid-October.
The latest data from the Queensland Department of Housing reveals that 546 people over the age of 80 are on the waiting list for public housing in the state.
The figures, released in August, show 25,363 applications on Queensland's public housing waiting list.
Around a third of the more than 41,000 people on the waiting list are homeless.
There were 3,608 people over the age of 65 on the public housing register, up from 2,990 in November 2019.
The average waiting time for people with "high" and "very high" needs is 19 months.
The Fairbnb Co-op, which began in Europe in 2014, soft-launched a Canadian platform on Wednesday. It doesnât have any listings yet, but once a critical number of hosts have signed up, the platform will officially launch in South Georgian Bay, Ont.
In many ways, FairBnb serves an identical function to its namesake. But it will be different from Airbnb in two important ways.
First, hosts must prove that the property is their principal residence, cutting out the estimated 50 per cent of hosts on Airbnb who manage multiple listings. And 50 per cent of the platformâs service fees go into developing community land trusts (CLTs), which are non-profit corporations that own land and use it to benefit their communities.
Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb's impact on residential communities.
We work towards a vision where communities are empowered with data and information to understand, decide and control the role of renting residential homes to tourists.