Tuesday, 1 August 2023

Short-stay accommodation

Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (19:15): (257) Today I am here to ask the Minister for Consumer Affairs to put a yearly cap on short stays in Victoria to help solve the housing crisis and bring thousands of Airbnbs back onto the long-term rental market. If you want to stay in an Airbnb tonight in my electorate in the City of Melbourne, there are over 5000 whole homes available – that is roughly 5 per cent of all the properties in the City of Melbourne. But if you are looking for a long-term rental tonight to actually, you know, have a place to live, well, you are out of luck, with vacancy rates at record lows. It is really quite ridiculous.

The thing is, almost 70 per cent of those Airbnbs available at the moment are owned by people who have multiple properties on these types of platforms, and most of the homes are empty for much of the time. The government could right now take action to bring some of these empty homes onto the long-term rental market for people who need a place to rent. In fact it is something that I have been calling for since 2014, almost 10 years ago – for the Labor government to intervene in the broken system and regulate the short-stay market by putting a yearly cap on the number of days someone can rent out a whole home.

In the 10 years since I have been calling for this change, what was touted as the sharing economy has actually become the taking economy. People buy whole properties to put on short-stay platforms like Airbnb because they can make so much more than in the long-term rental market. It has also fundamentally changed our city, and we need to do something about it. It pushes residents out of our city. It makes the housing crisis worse, but it also makes life hell for neighbours who want to live in a community but actually just end up living in quasi-unregulated hotels.

Now, there has been a bit of pressure on the government lately, with the housing crisis hitting fever pitch, and finally Labor has said that they will consider some solutions. But what have they actually put on the table? It is nothing except a potential tax of $5 per stay on Airbnb. It might give the state government some easy revenue, but actually just a simple tax of that amount will do nothing to put these homes back on the rental market. It will still be much more lucrative for a landlord to put a home on Airbnb if they are only being charged $5 a week – maybe up to $35 a week – than to rent it out long term, so this proposed solution is actually not much of a solution at all. It is just a way for Labor to claw back some money for the budget hole, but actually we need proper solutions.

We need what we have been proposing, which is a cap of 90 days per year on how long someone can put an extra home on Airbnb for; the creation of a register of short stays; and the actual regulation of this industry, like other cities are doing, still allowing people to put their home on Airbnb if they go away but stopping the sharing economy becoming the taking economy.