Airbnb, a large online shared accommodation platform, is growing rapidly, and its impact on housing and cities and communities is also a source of concern.
Recent research has shown that the pattern of Airbnb housing is very uneven in Australia's largest cities.
In high-end urban areas that attract tourists, Airbnb is likely to have the biggest impact on rental housing, with low-income areas less affected, according to the survey.
Focusing on the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas, the study focuses on three important issues:
Where is the location of the Airbnb house?
The following map shows the distribution of Airbnb services in Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas. These also show the composition of the house: a full-length rental (a separate house / apartment) or a partial rental (a room or a shared room).
Sydney Airbnb services are concentrated in popular tourist areas. Interestingly, some of the houses / apartments are rented in suburban and marginal suburbs, and the whole house / apartment is more concentrated in the city centre and on the eastern beach.
The situation in Melbourne is similar. Airbnb's listing houses gather in the center of the city, but also extend to residential areas outside the city centre. In Melbourne, however, the composition of the house (the full set of VS rentals) has less impact on its distribution than Sydney.
The size of the Airbnb market in the two cities is very different, where the population is almost the same, but Sydney has almost twice as many Airbnb homes as Melbourne. Separate houses / apartments vary more widely in full rentals.
Who's Airbnb's landlord?
To find out who is the landlord on the Airbnb platform, the survey analyzed Airbnb's housing data, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' SEIFA, the most widely used socio-economic status indicator in the country.
SEIFA is the four summary indices created by census information. For each index, each geographical area has a SEIFA score compared to the rest of Australia.
According to this score, all regions were ranked from low to high, with a score of 1 in the lowest 10%, compared to 10 in the top 10%.
From the analysis, we can see the unequal degree of Airbnb housing distribution. In Sydney, more than 95 per cent of all independent houses / apartments and about 87 per cent of partial rents (only rooms or co-apartments) are located in the best socio-economic areas (SEIFA scores of 9 and 10).
Melbourne's Airbnb service model is similar, with more than 80 per cent of stand-alone housing / apartment packages and about 70 per cent of separate housing / apartments partially rented in the best socio-economic areas.
Data analysis shows that Airbnb landlords are mainly concentrated in the two wealthiest areas of the city.
What is the impact on the rental market?
The survey also looked at the ratio of rental market size to Airbnb housing size, with special attention to the socio-economic status of each local government area in Melbourne and Sydney (using SEIFA).
This leads to some interesting results, which help explain how the local long-term rental inventory has been converted into Airbnb's short-term housing supply.
In Sydney, where socio-economic status is low (with a SEIFA score of 1-5), there is no large number of separate rental homes / apartments. So far, Airbnb has not replaced lease stocks in the poorest parts of Sydney's urban area.
But in a small number of regions with high socio-economic status (SEIFA score of 8 to 10 points), Airbnb market (only the whole set of rental) accounted for a significant proportion of the rental market. For example, in the coastal city of Waverley (10 minutes), Airbnb), the full set of rental housing information is almost 1/4 of the number of rental houses. At Manly and Pittwater (both 10), Airbnb rentals are about 20% of the rental market.
In other words, given the very small size of the Airbnb-less than 3.5 percent-compared with Sydney's overall rental market, the overall impact is expected to be minimal. But the impact is uneven, both geographically and socio-economic.
In fact, the impact of Airbnb on the rental market is mainly in several areas of Sydney, which have attracted attention, mainly in tourist destinations such as seaside areas. Although these areas are at the highest end of the socio-economic pedigree, there is also the danger that some local residents will be evicted from the most popular areas so that tourists can move in.
Melbourne's model is slightly different, or, in a sense, not as strong as Sydney. But Airbnb housing is also mainly concentrated in some areas with high socio-economic status.
Melbourne-based CBD's SEIFA score is 8, where Airbnb has the most listing information for a set of stand-alone homes / apartments. Compared with the size of the local rental market, the share of these houses is the highest, about 8%. As a result, the pressure on the rental market is much smaller than Sydney's Waverley, Manly and Pittwater,.