If anywhere demonstrates the power of Airbnb in Ireland, it is probably Galway.
The number of available rental properties available to rent in the city and the county have, on occasion, been outnumbered almost 10-to-one by short-term lets.
Scores of rooms and properties can be found either on Eyre Square or a short stroll from the city centre.
This week, a quick search on the short-term letting website for a weekend stay produced more than 100 options within a couple of kilometres of the train station in the city centre.
RM Block
Widening the search out, including the likes of Salthill just outside the city, and the website returned about 500 available lets. Taking in the Co Galway overall, the number grew to more than 1,000.
Many of these were single rooms and some were in shared family homes.
These included a cabin in a back garden, priced at €211 for two nights in early July, or a room for “one or two people in a family house” costing €411 for five nights.
“We are 23 years in this office and the level of frustration around long-term letting is palpable,” says Tuam-based estate agent Ronán Long.
“We still have that wave of returning migrants and immigrants coming and are trying to manage that demand. We could have 10-12 new parties strolling into the office every day – and some estate agents have stopped it – because it is a sapping operation.”
Long says he can understand why people in small communities with a property suitable for short-term letting find it hard not to list it on a sharing platform, particularly in summer. Many, he says, are under financial pressure due to the high cost of living.
“There is as much revenue to be generated in a week in a short-term let as there is in a month in a long-term rent,” he says.
This week, Minister for Housing James Browne brought a Bill to Cabinet that marks the latest effort to tackle the mismatch and bring some balance to the rental sector.
It has been described by the Minister as the “strictest” regime in Europe and will target short-term lets in towns with a population of more than 20,000.
The use of Airbnb and other short-term letting platforms has created tens of millions of euro in income for owners of Irish properties over the years.
Until 2019 it was something of a free-for-all.
There was little in the way of regulation, and thousands of houses and apartments popped up on these websites. At the same time, house prices and rents were soaring due to a lack of available housing stock. Homelessness worsened too.
That summer a new regime came into force requiring people to register as landlords if their properties were let out for more than 90 days a year and, more significantly perhaps, obtain planning permission for change of use.
It was hoped this would bring down the number of properties to rent on platforms such as Airbnb and return some to the traditional rental market.
In Galway city, Fianna Fáil councillor Alan Cheevers says it has been the failure to implement the existing planning rules that has allowed the situation to continue there.
“Nothing has been implemented since the planning rules change came in,” he says.
“They [the council] will tell you they don’t have the resources. But I gave them a solution at a meeting two years ago: take one member of staff in the planning office, get them to go through the websites and cross reference to see if they have actual planning or not. If not send a letter out straight away.
This was “a very simple solution but they wouldn’t do it”.
Cheevers concedes home sharing platforms have enhanced tourism in Galway, but they are also depriving hundreds of people of rented accommodation, including workers needed to run the tourism industry.
“We need to see stronger measures being implemented,” he says.
“I’m not after the guy with one or two properties, I’m after the guy with multiple. They don’t pay rates and some are accumulating vast amounts of money.”
Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on housing, Eoin Ó Broin, says the new rules didn’t work because they weren’t allowed to and couldn’t be enforced.
“In 2020 and 2021, Dublin City Council and Cork County Council made very valiant efforts to pursue this stuff in the courts. But you have to prove somebody was actually sleeping in a property for 90 nights a year,” he says.
“The regulations were fine but completely unenforceable.”
In the summer of 2022, a new approach said a short-term lessor should be listed on a single national register and – to get on that – they first needed planning permission.
It has taken almost four years on for a new proposal to reach Cabinet. Under Browne’s new plan, short-term lessors need to register with Fáilte Ireland and in order to do so, they need to obtain planning permission first.
Those renting out properties in towns with populations of more than 20,000 people will have until December to comply. In less populated areas, people will be given a two-year grace period.
Ó Broin is unhappy that a new provision for people who have been renting out properties for more than seven years without planning permission can seek retention under a simplified process.
He also raises questions about the 20,000 threshold.
“The decision to go from 10,000 to 20,000 was the result of carveouts to backbenchers and Ministers,” he says.
“This business of letting people regularise after seven years – that makes no sense whatsoever. One assumes there has been some lobbying about that.”
In urban areas where there is homelessness and a shortage of stock, people should be denied planning permission and should not be allowed to short-term let, says Ó Broin.
At the housing charity Threshold, chief executive John-Mark McCafferty says, in reference to the 20,000-person threshold: “The Goliaths have won out against the Davids.”
“You have very powerful lobbyists that have made their case to the Government. You have a large American tech firm who are very powerful and influential, and they’ll have made their thoughts known. They’ve won out,” he says.
The charity wanted a threshold of lower than 10,000 but could have lived with 10,000.
“You will now exclude a whole rake of settlements from the protections the new regulations will bring in,” he says.
McCafferty cites the likes of Galway and the western seaboard as having many small communities where existing housing pressures are being significantly compounded by this issue.
Browne has acknowledged that enforcement is the problem.
“It is completely unacceptable,” he said on Tuesday. “The rule of law has to be enforced.”
In Galway, Cheevers welcomes the idea of a register, which will move enforcement on to Fáilte Ireland and away from the councils.
“It’s a start. We need to see some traction on this,” he says.
There is now a rush on for those who wish to make their properties planning compliant by the end of the year.
Estate agent Ronán Long believes this will involve a substantial amount of work by Fáilte Ireland, perhaps a workload “they could do without”.
Long says American tourists have already paid deposits for properties in his “catchment area” in Galway for the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor in Co Limerick next year.
“Those properties are blocked off for the duration of that tournament next year,” he says.
“The short-term letting register will apply to that. They must be planning compliant.”
