Boom in Airbnb and holiday home accommodation

Friday, 5 August 2016

Popular tourism spots such as Queenstown are seeing growing numbers of Airbnb beds.

The tourism industry says a doubling of Airbnb properties highlights the need look at whether they are unfairly competing with commercial accommodation.

A tourism infrastructure report from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said Airbnb listings had doubled to more than 15,000 over the last year - 4000 of them in Auckland - with Airbnb hosts renting out rooms or houses for about 26 nights a year on average.

Holiday home rentals were also growing and the MBIE report said in March the holidayhomes.co.nz website listed 9700 properties offering more than 28,000 rooms.

Tourism Industry Aotearoa chief executive Chris Roberts said Airbnb and holiday homes helped plug demand for beds in key locations during peak season.

But he said New Zealand may well follow the lead of overseas countries who were imposing levies on Airbnb properties so they did not unfairly compete with commercial accommodation such as hotels and motels.

* Auckland's priciest Airbnb rentals**

Holiday homes earning more than $8000 annually have to declare that income to Inland Revenue, but Roberts said there needed to be another threshold covering properties that were clearly run as commercial operations.

There were holiday homes in Queenstown and Airbnb apartments in downtown Auckland with the potential to earn more than $50,000 a year, he said.

'That does suggest someone is running that as a business and they may well be getting an unfair advantage … You are essentially in direct competition with the hotel next door.'

Roberts said the MBIE report also highlighted the lack of data on the amount of private non-commercial accommodation and at the industry's urging MBIE was looking at a way of collecting those statistics.

'In some parts of the country like Northland and the Coromandel we know it's a very significant part of the accommodation offering, but we don't have any figures on what it is.

'If you're only monitoring commercial accommodation, that may be giving a false impression of how well tourism is doing in that region because it could be mostly from people staying in holiday homes, and official government figures could be suggesting a quite different picture.'