In order to manage the STL sector sustainably, Government needs to regulate it; every property should be required, as a minimum, to be registered, to have planning permission and pay commercial rates like every other business, to ensure it has minimal negative impact on the provision of permanent housing and long term sustainability of local communities.
In order to manage the STL sector sustainably, Government needs to regulate it to ensure it has minimal negative impact on the provision of permanent housing; every property should be required, as a minimum, to be registered, to have planning permission and pay commercial rates, just like every other business.
We also need to avoid making this a ‘city’ versus ‘rural’ issue. It is patently untrue that cities suffer disproportionately, and bundling everything else in to ‘rural’ if it is outside a city or Rent Pressure Zone (RPZ) takes no account of the actual facts surrounding the sector and its impacts; coastal communities are demonstrably the areas impacted most. Fig 1 below shows the heat map of the geographic spread of whole house/apartments on the AirBnb platform.
We also need to knock on the head the tropes that its a) a small sector and b) is the purview of a few country women who are making a few extra euro for their holidays every year… this is patently false, and thankfully Eurostat have undertaken significant research work on understanding the numbers of bed-nights generated across the 4 main STL bookings platforms, AirBnB, Tripadvisor, Bookings.com or Expedia, its scale and value. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/w/DDN-20230109-1
The figures below shows the number of bed-nights to NUTS2 (regional) level for Q2 in 2022.
