Time for Airbnb to come clean says Noosa Mayor

Airbnb have been caught making conflicting claims about their operations. So says Noosa Mayor Tony Wellington.

“Last week I received a letter from Brent Thomas, Head of Public Policy for Airbnb in Australia and New Zealand,” the Mayor said. “The letter stated that the ‘Airbnb community in Noosa has grown to more than 590 listings.’ Yet just a few weeks previously, in response to a request from a resident, Airbnb’s Emma Grover had written that, ‘We have about 1,100 listings in the Noosa Heads region.’

“Of course, Airbnb are not the only on-line, short-term letting service operating in Noosa Shire. However, this sort of obfuscation has been commonplace when dealing with letting platforms.

“Apart from providing wildly conflicting figures of properties being let, they also like to pretend that all their listings are home-hosted. The letter from Brent Thomas repeatedly refers to ‘hosts' and the one from Emma Grover includes under her name the words ‘home sharing club’. But again this is an attempt to conceal the facts.

“Deloitte Access have noted that around 62% of listings are entire houses or units, not spare rooms in places of residence. Industry analysts, Inside Airbnb, put the figure even higher at 70%. In other words, something like 70% are not ‘hosted’ at all.

“Most frustrating is Airbnb’s claims that they ‘support new regulation’ and ‘remained committed to working closely and collaboratively with governments to develop fair and innovative rules.’ Meanwhile they are working frantically behind the scenes to lobby state governments to ensure that no such rules are implemented.

“All Noosa Council wants is some transparency in the sector. It is local government’s role to manage and deal with land use and the resident amenity that flows from that use. That’s a large part of what town planning is all about. Until there is legislation that forces the likes of Airbnb to divulge property addresses, local government will not be able to effectively manage the impact that some of these properties have on the amenity of local neighbourhoods.”

24 May 2018