@Sarah977 wrote:
It's quite obvious to me that STRs in what are entire homes or apartments do definitely contribute to a housing crisis for locals. Private rooms in a home where a host lives, entire cabin, cottage STRs on a host's property, or occasional renting of an entire place where the host normally lives, but is temporarily out-of-town, or a vacation home that the host and their family and friends also use sometimes, don't contribute to the housing crisis, as those places wouldn't be rented out long-term to locals anyway.
But there's another factor to consider for those entire place listings, which is why the hosts' decided to STR them in the first place, which has nothing to do with just wanting to earn more money. Landlord/tenant laws in many places are so heavily weighted in favor of the tenant that I know people who decided to STR because they had had nightmare experiences of long-term lease renters who didn't pay the rent, were trashing the place, etc, and the landlords had a terrible time getting them evicted, sometimes having to wait months with no rent coming in, while the process ground along in tortoise fashion.
Apologies, for some reason I can’t tag you... but I can quote you... weird!
Wanted to say there are many of the same stories in NZ about long term rentals. Like most countries, the laws entirely favour the tenants and ‘due process’ for eviction is painfully slow, and expensive. There are also horror stories about landlords charging $700 per week in Auckland for damp, leaky homes full of mould and rotten carpet (they pop up in the news and on Fair Go now every few months). So laws have changed around these exceptional issues though, which has the effect of making things tough for all landlords, even those doing the right thing...
I also agree re: part of your home. Not everyone would choose LTR if STR options were taken away. That housing stock would just leave the market entirely, especially in my case.
The thing is, if the law changed tomorrow in my city to disallow STR, I would not choose long term rental or selling up and downsizing. I don’t know if I’ve said this before on the forum, but the reason we renovated our “downstairs” is because my mother in law is getting on in years and we expected she may come to live with us in (say) 4-5 years... maybe less, maybe more... she has ups and downs. Anyway, we wanted her to have her own self contained space. She comes to stay for 2-week blocks at the moment and we block off the Airbnb for her.
So long term rental or selling up and downsizing (the two things the government would most like to happen) wouldn’t happen in our case. We’d just take the Airbnb off the market and keep it empty for mother in law.