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Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

What you meant is there are 10x as many rooms available on AirBnB than are one-bed places to let. That's very different from:

> There's 10x more rooms on AirBnB than there are long-term rents in Dublin;

AirBnB places would have high turnover, probably an order of magnitude higher than long term rentals. It makes perfect sense that more of the former would be vacant at any given time.

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Yea, but when there are single digit numbers of family house rentals in Meath on done deal, something is wrong.

When there’s 100 people applying for rentals. Or people moving from Blanch to South Wexford or Carlow because that’s the closest they can afford. Rents have doubled or tripled in the last 10 years.

We bought 5 years back when we couldn’t find a rental, rents were 1400 for a 3/4 be then, we got 1600 3 years ago when we were away for a year, and comps now are 2500+, in a place with a 1.5 hr commute to Dublin.

It doesn't change the underlying issue. The issue is every single one of those rooms available on AirBnB is a room/house not available for long-term rent. And that's the problem. It's just as big an issue that there's 10x more one-bed rooms on AirBnB than there are one-bed places to let.

Like I said in another comment, AirBnB's account for less than 1% of the housing stock in Dublin. You'll have to find a different scapegoat.

1% of housing stock is misleading. Generally speaking, a 3% rental vacancy rate is considered healthy. Effectively, AirBnB is consuming 1/3 of the total available rental pool if it consumes 1% of housing stock.

Imagine if new construction was allowed. Then you could build more, and have both one home for AirBnB and another for long term rent. Have your cake and eat it, too.

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