Dr. Dáithí Downey:

Airbnb does not provide any data to Dublin City Council. The data in our presentation originate from an organisation called insideairbnb.com. It describes itself as independent and non-commercial. It allows a set of tools to be used online to explore activity on the Airbnb website. The data in the presentation are a snapshot of listings for Dublin available as of February 2017. There will be another data release pretty soon from insideairbnb.com. A gentleman by the name of Murray Cox is the originator of insideairbnb.com.

The data show the level activity on the Airbnb website for the categories of listings that would suggest potentially short-term letting activity. This distribution is shown on our PowerPoint presentation. What is useful from the distribution maps is that it shows the geography of Airbnb activity in Dublin city. One can see the concentration of accommodation offering in the city centre area attached to areas of cultural or other tourist activity. We will be commissioning an independent study of the scale of the collaborative economy, including other platforms as well as Airbnb. We will bring to bear several key questions, regarding not only the regulatory impact on planning development but also the impact on the overall dynamic of the housing market. In particular, we will be examining the sometimes challenging spillover effects which can occur where there is a concentration of Airbnb activity in an area which may be pushing up the price of residential space in that area and whether that is having a negative impact on affordability issues in rental markets, as well as with house prices. We are primarily concerned with trying to identify whether there is a significant adverse effect on the rental market in particular locales, given the affordability challenges present today in Dublin.