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Vacancy rates going up is good for renters and bad for landlords. It's not possible for it to be any other way; you simply don't make money from /not/ renting a

Vacancy rates going up is good for renters and bad for landlords. It's not possible for it to be any other way; you simply don't make money from /not/ renting a place, compared to renting it. It's like arguing that a grocery store is hoarding food because the shelves aren't empty. Ireland has never had an oversupply of houses in its history. A simple way to tell this is that the population of Ireland is still lower than it was in the 1800s; that's because all young Irish people move to America/Canada because they can't afford to live in Ireland. But that's still not the best metric to look at. The right thing to look at is price; if it's too high you don't have enough units. That is the only thing you need to know. Anything else is obfustication.

tmnvix 3y ago
Here's a real world example of supply being diminished by demand for housing as a non-primary residence. A family member I spoke with a couple of weeks ago is planning to purchase an apartment in the city to make it easier to visit their grandchildren. They won't be selling their primary residence to do this (but will be using equity from that residence). They will also subsidise the purchase via AirBnB. This is an example of a home being removed from the stock of housing available to be used as a primary residence. I don't believe that this situation is all that unique - though thirty years ago this would have been as people in their circumstance would not have been able to do this (due to low capital appreciation and lack of a large short term rental market).
- astrange 3y ago
  That is not very harmful because an apartment is a small box in the sky, and not filling it doesn't use up the land it's on top of, since there's other units in the building. Similarly, you can make up for it by adding more small boxes in the sky. Also, they may plan to do this, but investments involve risk and they may go out of business (sell the apartment) if it doesn't actually go like they expect it to.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    Where did they say it was a high-rise?
    - astrange 3y ago
      Infill development means everyone eventually gets to be a high-rise.
      - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
        This statement has a track record for being false the vast majority of the time, but okay.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  You're talking about investment demand, not the rental market. The two are mostly unrelated. Because most investment properties are made available to tenants since investors want to make money. Even if 20% aren't available because of AirBnB, all you have to do is build more and that 20% that's missing will be quickly dwarfed by new housing. What you've done is a very common mistake: the conflation of property buying with property renting. The two markets have very different dynamics, and rent is much easier to address by simply increasing supply of housing. High rents are the most urgent problem to address. It's harder to make everyone a property owner but at least don't crush them under the weight of rent. We're lucky that it's easy to address rents by increasing supply.

tmnvix 3y ago

Here's a real world example of supply being diminished by demand for housing as a non-primary residence. A family member I spoke with a couple of weeks ago is planning to purchase an apartment in the city to make it easier to visit their grandchildren. They won't be selling their primary residence to do this (but will be using equity from that residence). They will also subsidise the purchase via AirBnB. This is an example of a home being removed from the stock of housing available to be used as a primary residence. I don't believe that this situation is all that unique - though thirty years ago this would have been as people in their circumstance would not have been able to do this (due to low capital appreciation and lack of a large short term rental market).

astrange 3y ago
That is not very harmful because an apartment is a small box in the sky, and not filling it doesn't use up the land it's on top of, since there's other units in the building. Similarly, you can make up for it by adding more small boxes in the sky. Also, they may plan to do this, but investments involve risk and they may go out of business (sell the apartment) if it doesn't actually go like they expect it to.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  Where did they say it was a high-rise?
  - astrange 3y ago
    Infill development means everyone eventually gets to be a high-rise.
    - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
      This statement has a track record for being false the vast majority of the time, but okay.
hackerlight 3y ago
You're talking about investment demand, not the rental market. The two are mostly unrelated. Because most investment properties are made available to tenants since investors want to make money. Even if 20% aren't available because of AirBnB, all you have to do is build more and that 20% that's missing will be quickly dwarfed by new housing. What you've done is a very common mistake: the conflation of property buying with property renting. The two markets have very different dynamics, and rent is much easier to address by simply increasing supply of housing. High rents are the most urgent problem to address. It's harder to make everyone a property owner but at least don't crush them under the weight of rent. We're lucky that it's easy to address rents by increasing supply.