Short-term rentals and housing financialisation. Evidence and policy innovation

The success of digital platforms such as Airbnb and the subsequent proliferation of short-term rentals in cities have caused many challenges for local authorities, especially regarding the regulation and mitigation of their social impacts.

Current attempts to regulate short-term rentals assume that Airbnb and similar providers are part of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ in which hosts would occasionally share their homes with visitors.

However, there is increased evidence that short-term rentals have become professionalised, and that individual and corporate investors have started to channel substantial investment into this market.

In this regard, POLIS explores the links between short-term rentals and housing financialisation and, in doing so, will provide innovative understandings of the Airbnb-led restructuring of local housing markets.

POLIS draws on the principles of evidence-based policy making with the aim of advancing policy innovation for the regulation of this emerging economic sector.

In particular, POLIS will address three research objectives: it will (i) examine the professionalisation of the short-term rental market; (ii) investigate to what extent Airbnb channels financial investment into the housing market; (iii) elaborate alternative policy proposals for positive change. POLIS is a gender-sensitive project and has an intrinsic gender dimension in all phases of the research.

The project will explore the cases of two European cities: Lisbon and Leipzig.

It will provide comparative insights into a topic that has proved to be of significant political, economic and spatial relevance.

Research objectives will be addressed using a mixed-method design that collects and analyses data from a variety of sources, especially in-depth interviews and critical policy analysis.

With short-term rentals on the agendas of local authorities in different contexts, the POLIS project will produce high quality transferable outcomes for other EU cities and beyond.