Airbnb used to be a way to make a bit of money from a spare room. Now there’s one listing for every four properties in some tourist towns — and residents are struggling to find anywhere to call home. Plus, use our interactive to find out how many Airbnbs are in your town
A direct if not terribly English way to see if there are any locals left in a Devon village is to wander around it asking everyone and anyone, “Hello, are you a local?” On a beautiful summer Thursday in Lynton, I ask ten times and ten times I’m met with a variety of shrugs and head shakes. There are no locals left in this village. Or there are but they’re vastly outnumbered by people “from up country”.
“No, we’re from Clapham,” says a dad loading children and Co-op shopping into the back of his Audi. “Yes, we’ve Airbnb’d. Yes, it’s lovely here.”
Lynton is a village at the top of a gorge overlooking the Bristol Channel, and many tourists come here to take the cliff railway down to Lynmouth, the village at the bottom of the gorge. Lynton’s church is full of remembrances of sons and brothers — Smith, Smith, Smith, Jones, Jones, Jones — lost in the Great War or off lifeboats in 19th-century storms. It’s the sort of place that used to have local shops for local people but now has £3-an-oat-milk-latte bistros and estate agents with windows full of great investment opportunities. The butcher closed a few years ago and then so did the baker. Appropriately enough, the first born-and-bred Lyntonian I meet is the candlestick-maker.
“Not many people actually live down in Lynmouth any more,” says John, proud proprietor of Lyn Candles of Exmoor. “If you walk up Tors Road, all the houses on the left, most of them are Airbnb. I can remember when that was all families up there. I had a woman in the other day, she told me she was paying — I don’t know if this is right — £500 for three nights for an Airbnb. To stay down in Lynmouth. I couldn’t believe it.”
He segues into a story worthy of a spy novel about Lyn Candles’s signature scent. It involves a famous department store, some light corporate espionage and “probably bergamot” but it’s off the record, he tells me, so we return to the demise of the villages at the top and the bottom of the gorge. “Years ago you used to know everyone. Nowadays I bet I don’t know three quarters of the people. In winter it’s very quiet. It’s such a low wage here. You’ve got the holiday trade but in the winter months you’re not working. You’re on the dole.”
Devon locals complaining about how Devon locals are being priced out of Devon — so far, so unsurprising. But in the past few years the focus of complaint has changed. The main threat used to be second home owners. In 2011 local councillors formed a steering committee to promote affordable housing and local jobs; their charter firmly stated that stemming the tide of second homes was a priority. But now that threat has been overshadowed by a new and more virulent one. The area has seen a huge, Silicon Valley-charged influx of Airbnbs. Of the 1,022 residential properties in Lynton’s EX35 postcode, 163 of them are available for short-term rental on Airbnb. That’s almost one in six properties, making it one of the most Airbnb’d places in the UK. But not the most.
Airbnb was originally presented as a pocket-money booster for people with a spare room — the company’s pitch to investors in 2008 was “book rooms with locals, rather than hotels”. But data compiled exclusively for The Sunday Times Magazine illustrates just how pervasive Airbnb has become in many of Britain’s most popular tourist areas. That the demand for holiday homes should be higher in these areas is to be expected, but the scale of the shift to short-term lets — and the knock-on effect this is having on villages, towns and cities and the people who try to live in them — is dramatic.
Murray Cox is the US-based founder of Inside Airbnb, a project that uses data to show the impact of the online rental service. We asked him to analyse the distribution of Airbnb listings across Great Britain. According to the resulting data, there is close to one Airbnb listing for every five residential properties in the picture-postcard resorts of Salcombe in Devon, and Padstow and St Ives in Cornwall. It’s the same for parts of the Lake District: in Coniston, home of Ruskin and last resting place of Donald Campbell, it’s one in four.
On our heat map of Britain’s most Airbnb’d postcodes, Edinburgh is scorching. Five years ago a photograph of a block of flats just off the city’s Royal Mile made headlines because of the 11 key safes lined up beside its front door. Three years before that, there were none. Today that same door is lockbox-less once again because, in 2019, local landlords were warned they could face legal action if they attached them to doorways without permission from the owner of the building’s freehold.
“As part of the Airbnb explosion they are a very visual reminder of just how much housing we are losing into holiday rentals at a time when the city has an acute housing shortage,” said the city centre’s Green councillor Claire Miller at the time. Hosts have had to get clever with where they hide their keys. Residents have been playing a game of Where’s Wally — key safes have been spotted in playgrounds, cemeteries and on public railings. In Edinburgh’s EH2 postcode, there is more than one Airbnb listing for every four residential properties. For this analysis we have included entire properties, not spare rooms to rent in someone’s home.
For the people living next to an Airbnb it can be a frustrating experience. Last autumn Gary Dickson, 55, told Edinburgh Evening News of his three years of “chaos and worry” living below a city-centre Airbnb. “Me and my son suffer from disturbances day and night. But the landlord ignores all concerns. The constant change of guests over the years has been unbearable, people hauling bags up the stairs at 2am, 3am.” He’s lucky — at least they don’t have a karaoke room and a ten-person hot tub, more of which later.
In many of these locations the number of long-term rental properties has plummeted. Of course there are other factors fuelling the housing crisis, not least the many years in which house building in places where homes are in demand has fallen behind government targets. Years of low mortgage rates have not helped. But campaigners are clear that the rise of Airbnb and other online letting services has exacerbated the problem. In 2016 there were about 83,000 Airbnb listings in Britain, of which about half were for entire properties. By 2019 the number had reached 257,000. According to InsideAirbnb, there are now almost 340,000 listings, of which more than 250,000 are for the entire property.
When we asked Airbnb to give us its own data, it declined but stated that data from external monitors does not give an accurate reflection of activity on the site. Amanda Cupples, general manager for northern Europe, said: “Across the UK the typical host shares one home, often their primary residence, for just three nights a month, and four in ten say the additional income helps them stay in their homes and afford rising living costs — as well as boosting local businesses and communities that don’t typically benefit from tourism.”
In the candle shop in Lynton, Scruff — “that’s what everyone calls me” — has joined the conversation. “There used to be youth clubs, Scouts, Guides, everything now they’re all gone,” says the 66-year-old. He has worked for the council for four decades but for the past few years he has been Lynton’s chief and only road sweeper because “we couldn’t find anyone else to do the job. Like John, I was born and bred here. I like to keep the place tidy.” He says he’ll never retire but if and when he does, who will keep the streets clean?
“There are no young families,” he says. “It’s only us old folk. The only reason my daughter managed to get on the property ladder is because her grandmother passed away in London and left her some money.”
John nods and says that his daughter, a social worker, was only able to buy a place up the road in Barnstaple because he helped with the deposit. “She would never have worked her way into a home.”
A few very winding miles west is the much larger village of Braunton. In its EX33 postcode, which includes the surfing beaches of Croyde and Saunton Sands, census data shows there are 5,305 residential properties and our data finds 622 Airbnb listings — about one in nine homes are listed on the website. Each year in Croyde old bungalows are pulled down and luxury apartments and beach houses spring up in their place. On the road down to Croyde’s beach, a typical new-build called Serenity would not look out of place on Miami’s South Beach. “The office block?” asks an employee at the Thatch pub when I ask about it. I nod and she rolls her eyes. Serenity (in name but not in mortgage balance) is a white cube consisting of five “executive” apartments, which have all sold in the past couple of years for between £765,000 and £1 million. Its three-bed, three-bath duplex — “a luxury twist on a Cornish shack with a surf-inspired boho chic” — is already available to rent on Airbnb. Yours in peak season for £3,000 a week. Meanwhile the locals say that finding a place to rent long-term has become nigh on impossible.
Emma Hookway, 43, a single mother of three, grew up on a farm near Braunton and has lived in the village all her adult life. She has always rented because “for a long time, buying a property around here just hasn’t tallied with wages”. Rental prices have never been cheap but she always managed to scrape by. Then, in June 2021, her landlady issued a section 21 eviction notice, in which a tenant is given notice to leave — no reason required. “She needed the home for her daughter, which was completely fine,” Emma tells me over £4 hemp and coconut water smoothies at the Wild Thyme Café (my round). “Because of Covid, I still had six months to find somewhere.”
Tenants were protected from “no fault” section 21 notices at the start of the pandemic but from June 2021 evictions were permitted again, with the notice period extended from two to six months until October 2021. When Emma started looking for a new home, there was nothing on the market. “If a place did come up, there were all sorts of criteria, like I needed an income of £30,000,” she says. “I found one place but by the time I got there the landlord had already had 80 inquiries. He hadn’t even listed it yet, he’d just posted it on Facebook.”
When she got home Emma burst into tears and then tried to explain their predicament to her son, who is autistic. Then she posted on Braunton’s community chat room, asking if anyone else had noticed they were in a housing crisis? By the end of the day she had formed the North Devon and Torridge Housing Crisis group. In its first week 300 members signed up.
“We’re not against people coming here on holiday and we know that house prices have always been high,” she says, “but there has to be a balance.” Emma cleans upmarket holiday homes and, because it’s so hard to find local workers, she is well paid to do so. She is happy to admit that her income comes from tourism but the unmonitored and unregulated rise of Airbnbs, she says, is tipping the balance.
“Holiday homes used to be just that — places you’d book for a holiday, perhaps a bit of an upgrade, maybe with a sea view, maybe in the village itself. But with Airbnb you’ll find standard two-bedroom flats or terraced houses in residential areas, in suburbs. They’re coming from what used to be the long-term rental stock and there’s nothing left for those of us looking for somewhere to live.”
Emma was four days from couch-surfing homelessness when a flat above a social club — “unmodified since the 1980s” — became available. Which raises the question I imagine readers in parts of the UK far less stunning than the North Devon coast will be asking at this point: why risk homelessness when you could just move somewhere cheaper?
“Why should I?” Emma says adamantly. “I was born here. I’ve got three generations in the graveyard. Why should I be forced out of where I call home because everyone wants to do Airbnb? I know I’m not more important just because I’ve been here all my life — but there’s a community here. It’s my life, it’s my roots. It’s who I am. To move somewhere I don’t know, where I’d be isolated I don’t know how I would cope with that.”
Even if your response to that is “tough”, there’s a wider consideration. If Emma had left, that would be one less person to use and provide local services. Braunton doesn’t have as large a proportion of Airbnbs as Port Isaac, the Cornish fishing village made famous by the ITV series
Doc Martin, but it’s heading in that direction. Such is the state of the housing market in Isaac, it took 18 months to recruit a new GP. When ITV announced that Martin Clunes’s fictional doctor would be hanging up his stethoscope at the end of series ten, Cornwall Live reported relief among the few remaining locals.
Sandra has joined us at the Wild Thyme Café. In 2020 she was also served a section 21 eviction notice. “I’ve always paid my rent on time and I’m an avid member of the community,” she says. “I never thought, at 55, I’d be made homeless. I just assumed someone would come along and say, oh yes, I know someone with a flat coming up.”
Like Emma, she was given notice on the small but perfect place she’d been renting in Croyde and began a frantic six-month search. “After a few weeks I realised there was nothing,” she says. “Every place that came up, there were 40 or 50 applicants. People were offering to pay six months in advance. And they were, I think, open to offers. As a landlord, if someone offers to pay over, you’re going to snap that up.”
In the end Sandra bought a boat. She moored the scruffy old Norfolk Broads cruiser up the estuary in Velator, did it up and made it her home. Winters are beanie-in-bed freezing but summers make it worth it, she says. She has now bought two more boats — the start of her own marine property empire. They’d be perfect for Airbnb, I suggest. Would she ever stick them on the site? “No,” she says forcefully. “I’ve been asked so many times but if I don’t say it’s not about the money, who’s going to say it? I’m not a wealthy person. There are people who could afford to let one of their houses go to social housing but if I don’t say, no, I’m not going to do Airbnb, who will?”
In one boat she’s housing a young man she met at the food bank where she volunteers. In the other “there’s a carpenter who can’t afford to rent a house I only rent the boats out for £300 a month.”
As well as some recent persuasive Airbnb adverts aimed at potential hosts, there is another good reason why so many long-term lets have now become short-term ones: tax. Because, says Sean McCann, a chartered financial planner at the insurer NFU Mutual, “furnished holiday lets are treated much more favourably from a tax point of view than longer term property rentals”. As well as avoiding council tax, there are reliefs for capital gains tax, mortgage interest and pension contributions. “All of this can make running a holiday let more appealing.”
As a result, Graham Bell, North Devon council’s lead member for housing, says there are increasing numbers of people living in tents and caravans as well as boats. In his day job he is an intensive care nurse and, before becoming a councillor, he started campaigning for more affordable homes after seeing how difficult it was for his hospital in Barnstaple to recruit.
“People point out, quite rightly, that GP services, pharmacies, all essential services are stretched to the limit and they feel that more houses equals more people,” he tells me. “But they miss the fact that the GP can’t recruit staff because there’s nowhere to live. It’s not the physical resources, it’s the human resources that we need.
“We do need people coming in. But they can’t move into the area if there are no houses and if all the new-builds are being snapped up for other uses. The initial idea of Airbnb was supposed to be that you could rent out a room and make a bit of extra cash, and that was a fantastic idea but if entire communities are being lost, then it has gone too far.”
When the pandemic ban on section 21 evictions was lifted in June 2021, Tim Farron, the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale in Cumbria, “felt it on the ground”. In the following months the number of short-term rentals in the Lake District rocketed by 32 per cent. “It all happened in a really tight, terrible window and it felt like the Clearances,” the former leader of the Liberal Democrats tells me, referring to the large-scale removal of tenants in the Scottish Highlands that began in the 1750s. “In the small town of Sedbergh I had 25 families with eviction notices come to see me in one day. That same day a Sedbergh community group did an assessment of the number of job vacancies in the town there were 104 and not a single place available to rent on Rightmove.”
In his maiden speech to parliament in 2005 Farron highlighted the threat of second home ownership, but the rise of Airbnb lettings is, if anything, more pernicious. “It kills communities and it’s heartbreaking,” he says. “It’s not like people have to move to a different street. There is literally nowhere for them to go.” He says he has hundreds of examples of people being forced out. “It’s important to see this not only as a personal tragedy for the family — kids uprooted, employers losing their staff, parents separated from their support network and all the rest of it — but also you’ve got the impact on the economy. The majority of businesses in the Lakes are operating below capacity because they have no staff. It also has an impact on social care, on ambulance waiting times, everything. The impact is colossal and it’s hard to put a price on it.”
Farron tells me he was in a pub in his constituency last summer when an American couple came in for lunch. The landlord apologised and said they were no longer doing food and off they trooped to the next village. When they left, the landlord told Farron, “That couple are staying in the cottage my chef lived in last year.” On my Devon visit I counted eight “staff wanted” signs on one short stroll through Braunton. Airbnb claims it will take action if and when a tenant is “unfairly evicted” from a property that is subsequently listed on its site.
The residents of Britain’s most Airbnb’d places tell me it’s like living in a ghost town off-season — with dark streets and, in December, a total absence of Christmas trees and lights. And then there are the problem Airbnb neighbours. “You know another one’s gone to Airbnb when the hot tub appears in the garden,” one Braunton resident tells me. “Then you brace for the all-day prosecco in the pool.”
When Rishi Sunak visited Chelmsford in Essex in March to announce a clampdown on anti-social behaviour, he was confronted by Jeff Jones, a 73-year-old pensioner who had the misfortune to live adjacent to a former pub that had been converted into a £2,000-a-night 14-person Airbnb, with a ten-person hot tub and a karaoke room. The property offered private dining, a two-hour cocktail soirée, an outdoor dining pod and a sound system that forced another neighbour to move her son’s bedroom to the other side of their house.
“These places are let by the owners to groups of people with no control whatsoever,” Jones told the prime minister. Jones had complained to the local council on many occasions but nothing had been done. Airbnb responded by pointing out that parties are banned and that, “our 24/7 hotline for neighbours means anyone can contact us directly about a concern with a listing and we investigate and take action on reports received”.
As it stands the offending property in Great Baddow is no longer available to book on Airbnb but its removal only came after a prime ministerial dressing down. (It’s still on Booking.com, if you fancy it.)
So what is the answer for those living in the UK’s most Airbnb’d postcodes? The government’s levelling up bill — in consultation now — promises a national register of short-term lets, with more powers to help local authorities control numbers. In holiday hotspots planning permission may be required to change a property from a long-term to a short-term let. Tim Farron says this is long overdue. “We need three separate categories of planning use — a permanent residence, a second home and a short-term let,” he says. “It shouldn’t be possible to just evict tenants and switch to a short-term let in the same way I couldn’t turn my house into a fish and chip shop without planning permission. I’d need to apply and maybe they’d give it to me. But they might not because it was in the wrong place or because there were already enough fish and chip shops in the area.”
In the meantime some councils are trying to take matters into their own hands. In Edinburgh plans to clamp down on Airbnbs by introducing a registration scheme have been delayed after a court ruling. London has introduced a 90-day annual limit on short-term lets, although questions have been raised about how effectively that limit is policed. In York the Labour MP Rachael Maskell says that the scale of short-term lets has had a catastrophic effect on student and residential communities. Some city suburbs have been turned into “the Wild West”, she says, with constituents complaining about constant parties.
“The expansion of short-term holiday lets, and their impact on community life, is an issue of great concern to me and many other residents across the city,” she told The York Press. Last year she presented her “Fairbnb Bill” in the House of Commons. “Much of my bill has now been adopted by the government in this new legislation, although there are areas that I am still keen to see strengthened if we are to meet the scale of the challenges faced in some of our neighbourhoods.”
This is by no means a uniquely British issue. There have been protests against Airbnb in Mexico City, Barcelona and in tourist hotspots across the Mediterranean. In June Marseilles, which is hosting next year’s Olympic Games, joined a coalition of 20 communities objecting to Airbnb’s sponsorship of the Games and what organisers said were the 800,000 offers of accommodation in France on the site. New York City’s attempts to curb short-term rentals has led, inevitably, to lawsuits. Venice and Florence are also planning to impose strict regulations on new lettings.
In the UK Airbnb claims to be a supporter of greater regulation. “We recognise historic housing challenges in parts of the UK and we want to help,” says Cupples, the general manager. “That’s why we have led calls for new rules that give local authorities the tools they need to know what is going on in their communities, support local hosts who rely on the additional income, and clamp down on speculators.”
Back in North Devon I check out of my £80-a-night five-star Airbnb, a spotless converted studio flat above a garage at the bottom of the owner’s garden. Naughty, I know, given the weeks I’ve spent talking to displaced and disgruntled campaigners desperate for change. But it was cheaper than a hotel room and a hotel room doesn’t have a kitchen, a living room and a view of a lovely river. It was a great place to stay and I’m glad I chose it from about a hundred Airbnbs available in that area. Whether the other 99 got booked or not that night, I don’t know. But if they didn’t, that’s an awful lot of properties sitting empty in the middle of a housing crisis.
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