Experts Say Short-Term House Rentals Do Not Have Large Effect On Affordability

The popularity of room and home rental services like Airbnb and HomeAway are not expected to have a big effect on housing affordability.

The Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey reveals that only 5.1 percent of experts said that short-term rental services will have a “meaningful and large” impact on supply and affordability of long-term rentals. Nearly a third of respondents said that the short-term rentals will have a small impact on affordability.

Several experts gave differing reasons for the more limited effect they expected short-term rentals to have. One noted that the hotel industry was likely to be more impacted than the larger market overall. A different expert noted that the short-term and long-term rental markets were different and not effective substitutes. Another said the impact may be felt more acutely in very tight, supply-constrained markets like those in California and other booming coastal states, but that those effects likely wouldn’t spill over into the larger market.

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