Najem krótkoterminowy jest toksyczny na wielu polach. Obniżanie komfortu życia stałych mieszkańców pojedynczych budynków czy nawet całych dzielnic, którzy muszą użerać się co weekend z obcymi typami na bani, to tylko jeden z nich.
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A few years ago, I attended a college friend's bachelor party that we organized in Krakow's Kazimierz. We rented a spacious apartment through an app in one of the old but well-maintained townhouses. The party generally went well, but when we were leaving the building on the second day with a laughing bunch, one floor below we passed an elderly lady who was just entering her apartment. She turned her head for a moment and looked at us with an unusually expressive mixture of fear and disdain.
The expression on her face was so emphatic that it explained to me the true essence of short-term rentals much better than reports, data and studies. Thanks to an elderly lady from Kazimierz, Krakow, for a long moment I had the justified impression of being an ingredient in an extremely toxic recipe that poisons the lives of ordinary residents of apartment buildings occupied by tourists and partygoers.
Hoss of another distortion
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Short-term rentals are toxic on many fronts. Lowering the living comfort of permanent residents of individual buildings or even entire neighborhoods, who have to deal with strange types on the banana every weekend, is just one of them. But perhaps the most important, as it strikes at one of the key human needs - a sense of security.
When in my apartment community in Katowice some strangers were loitering in one of the staircases, on the Facebook group there were momentary interventionist posts on the matter and a lively discussion began - who and by what right let them in, next time they will have to be barked at with dogs, or at least treated with gas in the eyes.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/krakow-miasto-przeturyzmowane-airbnb/
Meanwhile, residents of popular tourist cities and neighborhoods have to regularly murder themselves with waves of strangers who show up for a few days, never to return afterwards. To make matters worse, these uninvited guests usually function in a party-recreation mode that is moderately compatible with the daily routine of the rest of the building's occupants.
Besides, short-term rentals are yet another distortion of the housing market. The original essence of the latter was the efficient and economically effective allocation of housing resources to meet the housing needs of the population. According to the well-known liberal mantra that the private sector will fulfill this task much better than officials, who will lose documents, swamp people with unnecessary bureaucracy and steal 20% more.
And if the housing market functioned in just this way, with private entities providing the population with owned or rented housing for a fee, then it would even be half a misery. The problem is that since then the housing market has begun to perform a number of other functions, this time already detrimental to the majority.
First, housing units began to be treated as investment assets, that is, they began to be acquired not for housing purposes, but in the hope of deriving an annuity from their price increases. Flippers, who search for very attractive price offers in order to resell the premises at a profit sometimes after only a few weeks, are one of the later symptoms of this disease.
Even later, it became apparent that residential real estate could not only be a commodity or investment asset, but even a service. Something like a subscription to access Xbox's Game Pass or streaming music from Spotify. Need a place to stay for a few days in downtown Barcelona? Go ahead, why will you overpay for some hotels and all those receptionists, cleaners or security guards. Let them go to some normal job, with an Excel, numbers and targets to make.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/gospodarka/explainer-airbnb-wyajmy-krotkoterminowe-polska/
This type of service is breaking new records in popularity. No wonder, for short-term users it is a very convenient and cheap option. Across the EU, the number of nights spent in app-rented accommodation is steadily increasing each year. According to Eurostat, in August 2019, guests of such "shared" apartments spent a total of more than 90 million nights in them. Last year, it was already more than 120 million. The increase of a third in a few years shows that the short-term rental industry is experiencing a real boom.
Poland should take inspiration from Berlin
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In Poland, the market for residential services is still really in its infancy - at least compared to Southern European giants. In July-September 2023, 14 million nights were spent in Andalusia in lodgings subscribed from any of the popular platforms. On Croatia's Adriatic coast, even 24 million nights were spent. In Catalonia it was 9.5 million, and in Tuscany and the French capital region it was 6.5 million each.
The Polish record-holders are the Pomeranian Voivodeship with Tricity and Lesser Poland with Krakow, where guests spent just under 3 million nights each in accommodations from Airbnb-like platforms.
Poland is not an overly popular tourist destination, so the use of Airbnb is less common here as well. So far, as the changing climate, the country's growing wealth and prestige, and the gradually increasing stock of premium housing will encourage an influx of users of such platforms.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/ue/airbnb-regulacje-europa-smejkalova/
According to data from Renters.co.uk, the number of apartments rented on a short-term basis in Poland is about 60,000, and it is increasing by another few thousand every year. In the next 2-3 years, the pace of the disease's progress will continue at a similar level. Particularly as more and more premium customers are emerging, who are able to "give higher rates of return."
The number of guests and the nights they spend is also growing. When it comes to the growing popularity of this form of recreational accommodation, Poland is already one of the European leaders. In the third quarter of last year, 13.5 million nights were spent in app-enabled venues across Poland, which is not impressive compared to the 65 million in France and 55 million in Spain. However, the figures for Poland thus mark a year-on-year increase of as much as 25 percent. Meanwhile, in the EU as a whole, the popularity of short-term rentals grew by "only" 14 percent. So we are bravely chasing the West also in what we would be better off not duplicating.
The dynamics of this "progress" can also be seen in this year's study commissioned by the Warsaw Municipality. Overall, in every district the percentage of units allocated to short-term rentals is below 2 percent, excluding Downtown, where it is about 4 percent.
However, the share of such units in newly delivered apartments is significantly higher. Last year, throughout Warsaw, there were 20 new listings on rental platforms for every hundred new apartments. Theoretically, therefore, one in five new apartments in the capital could go to the short-term rental market. In Wola even two-thirds, and in Praga North one in three.
The expansion of such units causes a number of problems in the housing market. First and foremost, they are pushing out traditional long-term rentals. In a study The Airbnb rent premium and the crowding-out of long-term rentals from 2023, the authors showed that the number of listings posted on the platforms is correlated with higher vacancy rates. Thus, most of the time these units are standing unused, instead of meeting local needs. Stories about efficient allocation of resources by unregulated markets can be put between fairy tales.
The authors of the article When Airbnb Listings in a City Increase, So Do Rent Prices featured in the Harvard Business Review in 2019, in their study, showed that a one percent increase in Airbnb listings is causally related to a 0.02 percent increase in rental rates and a less than 0.03 percent increase in property prices. "While these effects may seem very small, it is important to consider that the average year-on-year increase in Airbnb listings is about 44 percent." - the researchers pointed out.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/przyborska-siemieniako-uchodzcy-w-warszawie-hieny-airbnb-nie-traca-okazji/
At the same time, there is evidence that this phenomenon can be successfully combated. That's what Berlin has done, with two rounds of restrictions far restricting the number of short-term rental listings. In this year's study Airbnb and rental markets: Evidence from Berlin researchers proved that regulations introduced in 2016 and 2018 led to a massive withdrawal of listings on the Airbnb platform for Berlin. In the three months alone before the 2016 reform went into effect, some 4,000 of them disappeared.
A law went into effect in 2016, according to which every short-term rental apartment must obtain a special permit from the city. In 2018, the prerequisites for obtaining such a permit were clarified, and a requirement was introduced to publish with each offer the registration number that each such apartment received from the authority.
As a result, the scale of this phenomenon in the German capital is relatively small. According to Eurostat, fewer than 900,000 Airbnb nights were recorded in Berlin in July-September 2023 - more than twice as many as in nearby Mecklenburg (2 million nights) and West Pomerania (2.3 million).
Persecution of Airbnb entrepreneurs
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The drastic reduction of short-term rentals is therefore no great philosophy, but a matter of political decision. Minister of Funds and Regional Policy Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz announced the introduction of restrictions, among which will first be the registration of all such establishments, which will then make it possible to diagnose the problem, introduce as yet unspecified tax solutions and hold owners accountable for their new obligations.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/przeklenstwo-wiecznych-wakacji-ostrowski/
If obtaining such registration required the prior approval of the local community, subject to a number of criteria, the number of units rented in this way would probably drop significantly. Additional taxation of apartments that stand empty most of the time, on the other hand, would prompt their owners to look for permanent tenants.
However, there is a long way from declaration to implementation. Especially with the current government, which, a year after the elections, has yet to make exactly any significant statutory changes, and there will be quite a few defenders of "oppressed entrepreneurs" from Airbnb in the coalition - and even in Minister Pełczyńska-Nałęcz's parliamentary club itself.
