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WA’s Airbnbs are set for a shake-up. But will it help the state’s dire rental market?
Airbnb says a $10,000 cash incentive for owners to switch their short-stay holiday homes to long-term rentals is unlikely to make much of a dent in Western Australia’s housing supply crisis.
The WA government on Thursday released long-awaited changes to the state’s short-stay accommodation rules in another effort to address a housing crisis driven by a historical rental vacancy rate low of 0.7 per cent.
Finance Minister Sue Ellery.Credit: Hamish Hastie
On top of the cash incentive, the government will introduce a mandatory register for all short-stay accommodation and firm up rules around the planning approvals required for owners to rent out their property for un-hosted stays.
The government estimates there are about 12,000 to 13,000 short-stay accommodation properties currently operating in WA.
Airbnb Australia public policy head Michael Crosby was not convinced the cash incentive would have much impact on WA’s housing issues, given short-term rentals made up a small per centage of the housing stock and many properties on the platform were holiday homes or a primary house.
“Our hosts are real people, who love their communities, support jobs, and direct guests to local businesses during their stays, but who are also struggling with the cost of living,” he said.
“Housing issues have existed long before the founding of Airbnb, and targeting these properties is not a long-term solution.”
The incentive will be split into payments of $4000 at the start and $6000 if the lease reaches 12 months.
It is only on offer for properties that have been on booking platforms for the past six weeks and owners can only charge a maximum of $800 per week in Perth and $650 per week in the South West.
However, only $2.7 million has been set aside to fund the incentive scheme, which includes administration costs meaning less than 270 homes will be converted to long-term rentals.
Finance Minister Sue Ellery said government modelling suggested that $10,000 was attractive for property owners in older inner-city suburbs like Bayswater and Maylands to put their one and two-bedroom units onto the long-term rental market.
She said there was no definitive target and defended the small number of properties the incentive would unlock.
“If we get 20 to 50 more houses into the long-term rental market than we have now, that’s a good thing,” she said.
Planning Minister John Carey said the reforms were part of a suite aimed at stabilise WA’s rental market, which included Wednesday’s $24 million announcement of cash payments to help people at risk of eviction.
Brett Rowley purchased his four-bedroom, two-bathroom Dunsborough holiday home Blue Horizon in May this year to rent it out as short-stay accommodation.
He welcomed the register and said the City of Busselton already required planning approval for short-stay homes, so those new regulations would have little impact.
However, he said the $10,000 incentive was not nearly enough, and the rental caps were too low for him to consider putting the home on the rental market.
“There’s no real incentive for me to do that – in fact, it’s a shortfall for me, and it also means my house down south is inaccessible for me. I can’t use it,” he said.
The new rules have not technically capped the number of nights that a home in the Perth metro area could be rented out as short-stay accommodation but owners wanting to rent it out for more than 90 nights a year will be forced to get planning approval from their council.
In regional areas, local governments will have the ultimate planning control over whether owners can rent their properties out as short-stay accommodation regardless of how many nights they intend to do it for.
Owners will be required to put their house on the register before being able to advertise and take bookings for their property.
Registrations will open in the middle of next year and all homes must be registered by January 1, 2025.
Ellery said there was never any consideration given to a Victorian government-style tax on short-stay accommodation.
“We wanted to provide an incentive,” she said.
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