Mr. Eamonn Tansey:

Thank you Chairperson for inviting us here today on behalf of the committee. Our spokesperson, Niamh Randall, sends her apologies for not being able to attend.

The Simon Communities are a network of communities providing local responses to local needs and issues of homelessness all around the country in Cork, Dublin, Dundalk, Galway, the midlands, the mid-west, the north west and the south east. Similar to Mr. Allen, our submission is based on two very important issues at this moment. We wish to deal with the complete lack of affordable housing options in Ireland at the moment, which we believe to be at the core of the housing and homelessness crisis. In that sense our priority must be to deliver new models of affordable housing such as cost rental, which is one financially sustainable social housing model.

This has to be backed up by increasing local authority social housing construction as much as possible.

The second contextual element would be the private rented sector. It is not working for renters, namely rent supplement or HAP recipients. If one looks at the most recent rental report on the website Daft.ie, one will see that rents have increased by 52% nationwide, availability of property is down 82% and this has the impact of creating an ultra competitive and crowded private rental sector. The knock-on effect of this trend on social housing is that it makes the rent supplement and HAP payments increasingly ineffectual. A recent study by the Simon Communities of Ireland has shown that 88% of properties are beyond the reach of people in receipt of these vital housing payments. I did a brief exercise on the data to try to approximate the scale of short-term rentals in Ireland by conducting Airbnb letting searches in key locations around the county. A search of entire place rentals in Cork on Airbnb for this working week shows 51 properties available for two people to rent. The site user, me, is also informed that these 51 properties represent only 17% of total listings in Cork, suggesting that full listings of entire place rentals would equate to approximately 300 properties in that location. Using a similar search in Galway, 185 entire place properties are available representing 27% of total listings in the area, suggesting full availability would equate to 685 properties. A search in Limerick reveals 24 entire place rentals, or 20% of total listings, suggesting there are approximately 121 listings in Limerick. In Dublin where the problem is most acute, a search reveals over 300 properties available to rent, representing 15% of total listings, suggesting total listings in Dublin could equate to approximately 2,000. The main caveat is that I undertook a loose crude exercise but it illustrates the lack of data that is at the core of the problem.

To gauge the impact of short-term lettings on the private rented sector, we could compare availability on Airbnb to the Daft.ie rental report. This would reveal that the 300 entire place properties available to rent on a short-term basis in Cork represents 37.5% of total available long-term lettings in Munster as of 1 May. In Galway there are 13.5% more properties to let on a short-term basis than the total number of properties available to let in Connacht and Ulster combined. In Dublin, the 2,000 entire place properties available to rent on a short-term basis on Airbnb are approximately equal to twice the total number of available properties available for long-term letting in Dublin. As Mr. Allen alluded to, if these short-term lettings were released into the private rented sector, one could argue that it would reduce the over-competitive nature of the sector and possibly slow down increasing rents. The impact on the wider housing sector is less simple to gauge. One potential impact of short-term lettings on the cost of housing was demonstrated in the planning case taken by the Temple Bar residents' group against an Airbnb host operating a short-term let with annual rental earnings of nearly €80,000. The property came to the attention of the group when it was listed for sale at a price of €425,000, which the Temple Bar residents maintained was above the local average of similar properties of about €275,000. The inflated asking price was said to reflect the revenue stream generated by ongoing short-term letting through Airbnb. One could suggest that successful short-term letting properties like this could drive up local house prices on the basis of profitable revenue streams.

One solution to the problem would be to explore different regulatory measures to lessen the negative impact of short-term lettings on the housing and rental market. A number of European capitals have introduced new regulations combined with increased enforcement in an attempt to curb the impact of short-term lettings on the housing and rental markets, examples include Berlin, Germany, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, cities across France and more recently increased enforcement procedures in Barcelona.

In this context we must protect people who are currently living in the private rented sector. To do so, we must fast track existing commitments to introduce indefinite leasing, giving people a long lease only dependent on their conformity with the lease agreement; we continue to see an urgent need to introduce rent certainty with rents linked to the consumer price index.

We need to boost the affordable housing supply. The Simon Communities of Ireland believe that one of the primary solutions to the housing and homeless crisis lies in strategic State investment in affordable housing for low and middle income families. The commitment to develop a cost rental model for the rental sector is encouraging and NESC and the Nevin Economic Research Institute have done great work in this regard. Tax incentives for cost rental providers must be considered to ensure their viability. The proposed use of local authority owned land to deliver rental units targeting middle income families is welcome but must be balanced by securing significant conditions from investors in terms of security of tenure, rent certainty, quality, safety and fire standards, developer contributions similar to the existing Part V contributions for social housing and ultimately local authorities must be fully resourced to re-engage in large scale social housing construction, given that current completion rates are disappointingly low at 665 units built in 2016.

In conclusion, we need to increase availability and access to affordable housing for low and middle income families. In the private rented sector it is crucial that we increase security of tenure and rent certainty for all those living there and the knock on effects on people in receipt of State housing benefits.