The coastal towns with the most homes listed on Airbnb

3 months ago 23

Some of Australia’s most sought-after coastal towns have double the proportion of Airbnb listings as the rest of the country, and one beach hotspot has 10 times as many, new research has found.

In the Byron shire, 17.7 per cent of all homes were listed on the Airbnb platform in December 2024, based on InsideAirbnb data analysed in a report by the University of Sydney for the Australian Coastal Councils Association and released on Thursday.

The Byron shire is home to a higher share of Airbnb properties than the national average.

This compares to about 1.6 per cent of housing stock nationally that is listed on Airbnb, found the report, titled Short term rentals in Australia’s coastal regions: Recent impacts and policy responses, which analysed the letting market in popular coastal communities.

It was followed by Busselton, south of Perth (8.8 per cent), and the Bass Coast in Victoria (7.8 per cent).

Even the regions with the lowest prevalence of Airbnb listings – the Sunshine Coast at 3.2 per cent and East Gippsland in Victoria – had double the national average.

Lead author of the report Nicole Gurran said a significant proportion of the housing stock in these areas was being used for short-term letting.

But she said it was not possible to conclude there was a jump in the number of holiday homes as the data on holiday homes available was inadequate even before the platforms began, and there have always been secondary homes in beach towns.

“It also shows you need to think more carefully about how you use your existing housing stock if you’ve got a growing population, because it’s not able to cater to that,” she said.

Last September, the NSW government introduced a 60-day-a-year limit in Byron on stays where the host is not present. Sydney and parts of regional NSW have a 180-day cap. Victoria charges a 7.5 per cent short-stay levy.

Gurran said it was too early to know whether the Byron cap was effective, but she said tourism overall continued to grow in the area despite the cap.

“It’s certainly been an important line in the sand to say when they do get new housing supply in Byron, it’s going to support local demand,” she said.

The report found benefits of short-term rentals include economic opportunities for locals and support for the visitor economy.

It said negative impacts identified by local stakeholders include impacts on rental availability, rental costs and house prices.

Gurran said the report is not claiming that the dramatically high rental increases in coastal areas over the past five years were due to short-term rentals.

“But what is happening is because you’ve got so much of your housing stock absorbed on the short-term rental market, it’s not then available to meet the increase in demand driven by other things, people moving to the area or the loss of housing stock [in floods or bushfires],” she said.

The report found income from frequently available holiday rentals was not necessarily higher than income from long-term rentals.

In Byron, the monthly income from frequently available homes was less than 80 per cent of median rents. On the Mornington Peninsula, short-term landlords could expect to make closer to 140 per cent of median rents.

Quantify Strategic Insights head of data and insights Angie Zigomanis, who was not involved in the research, agreed that some holiday home owners may not choose to make a home available to long-term renters if they faced restrictions on short-term letting.

“Somebody who has a holiday home might only rent it out infrequently and wouldn’t otherwise rent it out as a permanent rental because they’d like access to that premises for themselves. It’s really a means to help cover some of their ownership costs,” he said.

But other owners may choose to short-term let to get higher returns, which affects local workers who would like to live in the area but find that a home is not available as a permanent rental, he said.

He said the regional rent rises of the past few years had been driven by the wave of city dwellers moving to the regions to work remotely.

“We’re still not building enough to meet not just the population growth but also potentially that tourism demand,” he said.

Many coastal towns have a higher share of Airbnb properties than average.

The report recommended that states require platforms to provide address-level quarterly reports on short-term listings and restrict the number of nights properties can be used in high-demand markets. It also recommended councils keep registers of short-term rental properties.

Airbnb official Michael Crosby said Airbnb had long advocated for evidence-based regulation of the short-term rental sector.

“This includes measures such as mandatory statewide registration, an exclusion register, data-sharing and a code of conduct.”

Stayz’s senior director of government & corporate affairs Eacham Curry said Stayz has also advocated for data-gathering on the size and scope of the short-term rental accommodation sector, such as a real-time, state-wide registration database of these properties.

“Short-term rental accommodation is not the cause of, or the solution to, current housing pressures.”