Classifying people into commercial and "sometimes" renters makes sense. If you want your business to be bigger, comply with more regulations.
Most the full-time airbnb places in my neighborhood seem to be vacant most the time. So I'm not sure it's a way to increase property utilization so much as it's a way for people who move out of town to cover the cost of hanging on to the property even though they're not really using it anymore, but without taking on the same legal obligations that renting the house to a full-time tenant would incur.
This implies that rent should rise to meet nightly AirBnb rates, which has all sorts of implications ..
Otherwise, an increase in density might reduce airbnb's impact on rents, but at the cost of making airbnb even more annoying.
(Edinburgh is building housing, but lots of it is suburban low-density)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo#/media/...
^^ They're the green part of this map. The non-green part of this map is, technically correct is the best kind of correct, also Tokyo (administered under Tokyo-to as opposed to any other prefecture), but it's not core Tokyo.
(Akiruno-shi, for example, looks like this: http://www.bbqjp.com/portfolio/dainimizube/ )
The density of the 23 wards is ~twice that of Queens, which much of it being 3x. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo
Technically correct but misleading; Queens is not especially dense. I dropped a pin at random in Queens:
https://goo.gl/maps/ULFor21SjXq
Here's a random pin-dropping in one of the 23 wards:
https://goo.gl/maps/Ah5kaMKvyLn
Roughly equivalent, I'd say, and not atypical for Tokyo. But compare to what most anyone would call a "dense" part of Manhattan:
https://goo.gl/maps/kKMgK4qZVcG2
HN people who talk about the "density" of Tokyo are picturing skyscrapers and block housing, but it's not an accurate picture. Having spent plenty of time in both cities, Tokyo is about as dense as the outer boroughs of New York, on average.
With the correct numbers, Tokyo "23 wards" becomes 40 % higher than NY metropolis, and approximately the same as Brooklyn (~15000 / km2). I would still argue it is not as dense as many people think (e.g. people often don't think of Paris as super dense, even tough it is itself ~40 % higher density that Tokyo). Yes, the houses are small, but except for within the few central wards, there are not that many high rise buildings.
In Vancouver, condo towers are coming up like weeds, but it's not reducing the cost of living for anyone. People who already have money buy those condos, they rent them out at high prices so they can pay their mortgage, people have to rent them because there's nowhere else because literally no one is building rental housing, and so rents go up.
Rents go up, so property values go up because there's so much money in them, so people build more condo towers, and the cycle repeats.
The problem is that we have hundreds or thousands of speculators who got in early and have the real-estate wealth to leverage to purchase more real estate, but they're in it to make a short-term profit. They don't have the capital to set prices for the long-term, so they have to rent things out at pretty high prices.
Meanwhile, if we had purpose-built rental, you'd be looking at one building, one landlord, one set of rents, and a business with a long-term view rather than real estate speculators who are just holding onto a condo as long as they can before they can cash it out and retire (or leverage it to buy more).
Not sure whether it's a good solution or not. Mixed feelings about it.
Just market it as a holiday rental on dates corresponding to big London-based football matches, when people traveling might often pay hugely inflated nightly rates.
Maybe supplement during academic conferences or government events. In the right part of London and for a unit with the right amenities, you probably could still turn a net profit annually just on 90 days, and leaving it empty the rest.
Which would mean it could still negatively affect housing shortage issues and home prices, and still result in poorly behaved tourists nearby for 1/4 of the time.
It's worth noting that this distinction between who technically isn't complying and who will actually get prosecuted is a big part of why people have such different feelings about GDPR. Some people are focusing on the difficulty of complying and the penalties that could be assessed; others are focusing on the unlikelihood of small, mostly-compliant, well-meaning operations being targeted.
Also worth noting, this kind of selective enforcement can absolutely be used in a harmful way or have unintended negative consequences. I'm just trying to point out why a jurisdiction might pass a law even if they don't expect anyone to abide by it.
"I have mixed feelings about the Japanese Airbnb news. On the one hand: does it seem like the optimal regulation? Probably not. On the other hand: my condo’s live-in supervisor had to update their “We will call police if we spot illegal tenants” policy with “Note: Patrick isn’t”"
(patio11 is that rare thing, a Western permanent resident of Japan, and has lots of tweets on the subject of how Japan combines legendary, genuine politeness with a system that excludes non-Japanese)
But this doesn't stop you using other services. While non have the same inertia and awareness amongst the public as AirBnB there are several so it is easy to get around the limit by using several providers who don't talk to each other.
(We have been having problems with a neighbouring flat that is being run in this way. The details are murky but it appears to be intentionally managed like this)
No amount of demand suppression will ever fix a supply issue. “We’re better off not building up housing infrastructure subsidized by short term leases and just trying to suppress any demand that changes the market clearing price”