‘It’s raw capitalism’: Inside the rise of Airbnb in Bristol

“When people visit Bristol, they all wax lyrical about the architecture,” says Sue Kilroe. “But look closer in Kingsdown and you can see key safe boxes everywhere proliferating at the most incredible rate.”

Kilroe describes an “alarming” change to the composition of housing in her neighbourhood.

Lockboxes attached next to the buzzers and bells of front doors are used to store keys for flats rented out on short-term let platforms like Airbnb.

“These were previously places where people were able to rent a flat for a year or so when they needed,” Kilroe adds.

“But those kinds of places are disappearing at a great speed.”

Airbnb’s founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the site in 2008 after supplementing their rent in San Francisco by hosting people on an airbed in their living room. Fifteen years on, it has become an accommodation behemoth with more than seven million global listings.

Airbnb says it provides a flexible way for hosts to earn extra money on their terms while travellers can “live like a local” in affordable homestays in place of traditional hotels and B&Bs.

Critics argue, however, that the homestay provider decimates communities by forcing up rents and importing large numbers of tourists who lack a vested interest in an area’s wellbeing.

It’s a well-documented issue in cities such as New York, Barcelona and Edinburgh where local authorities are implementing or exploring regulations to mitigate their negative impact.

The UK government recently consulted on new measures designed to curb the rise of short-lets like Airbnb which could see a new planning class created for such properties.

A spokesperson for Airbnb told Bristol24/7 it “recognises the historic housing challenges in parts of the UK” and “wants Airbnb to be part of the solution”. They also said Airbnb is often used as a “catch-all term” for short-term lets and other platforms are also responsible for the booming market.

In Bristol, a city where private rents have increased by 52 per cent in the last decade and slots for rental viewings get snapped up in minutes, the rise of Airbnb is starting to frustrate residents.

Kilroe has lived in the same house on Thomas Street North in Kingsdown since 1993. A former nurse and public policy academic, she is now semi-retired and a member of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, a community enterprise established “to promote the area as a cultural quarter”.

Her home has become something of a local landmark since she commissioned a cow-themed mural on its walls to reflect its little-known history as a cowshed going back as far as the 1600s.

This was when Kingsdown consisted of open countryside before the throws of urban development converted the steep land into a dense, inner-city neighbourhood.

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In recent times, Kilroe has noticed a subtler change as more and more houses and flats in the neighbourhood have been converted into short-term rentals.

The phrase she uses to describe the rise of Airbnb is “raw capitalism”.

“It’s changing Bristol for the worse because it’s continuing the story of property for the market and not for living,” she says.

“Soon, will there be anything left for tourists to see? All we have is multiple occupancy houses, student accommodation and people staying in Airbnbs to do the nightlife.”

What does the data say?

There is no easy way to work out exactly the extent and impact of Airbnb in Bristol, with much of the evidence based on rumour and hearsay about homes being bought and converted for the platform by anonymous landlords and noisy visitors disrupting locals.

To confuse things further, there are numerous websites that advertise short-lets, and properties come and go from them sporadically. These firms also seem unwilling to share statistics.

The only open version of short-let data comes from Inside Airbnb – a non-commercial project that aims to highlight the impact of the service on residential housing markets and communities.

Inside Airbnb offers limited insight into just how many homes are being taken from the rental to the short-let market via Airbnb, the biggest platform for short-lets in Bristol.

The dataset provides a breakdown of top hosts and the number of entire homes, private rooms, shared rooms and hotel rooms on Airbnb in cities across the world including New York, Berlin and Manchester, as well as Bristol.

It tells us that there are thousands of rooms and homes in our city that could have people living in them all the time – but are being rented out as Airbnbs instead. Airbnb claims the site relies on “scraped data” and is not an accurate reflection of activity on its platform.

As it stands in Bristol, there are a total of 2,560 properties currently being advertised on Airbnb, according to Inside Airbnb. Of these, 875 are listings where people stay in a room or part of someone else’s home and 1,667 are ‘entire homes’ or ‘apartments’.

With 207,140 homes in Bristol, according to Bristol City Council, it means for one in every 80 homes in Bristol, the whole house or a private room in the house is listed on Airbnb.

The most Airbnb-dense ward is Ashley –  covering Montpelier, St Werburgh’s and St Paul’s – with 289 Airbnbs making up 11.3 per cent of all Bristol listings.

This is partly because Ashley is one of the city’s largest wards; and also because it includes the ‘trendy’ locales of Stokes Croft and Gloucester Road, with descriptors like “vibrant”, “up-and-coming”, “counter-cultural” and “bohemian” common in their Airbnb online listings.

Ashley is followed by Central ward with 262, then Clifton with 186, Clifton Down at 166, Southville at 135, Cotham at 117, Windmill Hill with 113, Lawrence Hill at 111, Easton at 102, Redland at 92 and Hotwells & Harbourside at 90.

New ‘aparthotel’

The Cotham Arms on St Michael’s Hill was once a thriving pub with a long history – established in 1871 as the Highbury Park Tavern and undergoing a variety of iterations since then.

But, in a sign of the times, the building is now the Cotham Arms Apartments, a so-called ‘aparthotel’ made up of three studios and two one-bedroom flats each listed on Airbnb.

It is the latest opening from Your Apartment, a Bristol-based business which manages 29 other Airbnbs across Bristol including in Brislington, Clifton and Old Market, as well as further afield in London and Milton Keynes.

“The overall transformation of the Cotham Arms into a one-of-a-kind boutique collection of serviced apartments demonstrates the opportunities available to publicans, landlords and developers around the UK,” says Your Apartment founder Toby Guest.

“Repurposing this type of property allows flexibility for landlords should they wish to preserve any of its unique, character-filled and historical features.

“This also allows them to reap a higher return on their asset(s) due to significantly lower running costs.”

The new aparthotel has opened at a time when pubs are struggling to stay afloat. Figures from Altus Group show that nearly 400 pubs “vanished” in the first six months of 2023, almost matching the total for the whole of 2022, when 386 were lost.

“At this rate, we’ll lose all our local facilities,” comments one Bristol24/7 reader.

Developers seek a similar fate to the former Cotham Arms for a former bank located a mile away in Bishopston.

Honour Properties, which manages student flats and serviced apartments in Cheltenham and Bristol, has applied for planning permission to convert the upper floors and rear of the old NatWest building on the corner of Gloucester Road and Shadwell Road into ‘Airbnb-style’ fully serviced apartments. Although the company has pledged to keep commercial space below, dozens of objections have flooded in.

One resident of Shadwell Road says the development would “change the nature of the street and local community, introducing a significant transient element which is also likely to undermine the pride and care that the permanent local residents have for the street.”

“Transient visitors do not have any investment in the local area – here today, gone tomorrow,” laments another neighbour.

“Airbnb party house”

Parties are banned on Airbnb and the platform has the power to remove listings and hosts that do not follow its policies. The website reported a 75 per cent drop in the number of party reports in the UK since it introduced the ban in 2020.

But these rules didn’t stop the lives of residents in leafy Henleaze from being made miserable by an “Airbnb party house” on their street.

The activity led to a bitter row, with complaints that the owners of a five-bed house on Hobhouse Close had created a “revolving door” of unwanted guests who disturb their peace by shouting, drinking, fighting and playing loud music late into the night.

Geoff Gollop, a Conservative councillor for Westbury-on-Trym & Henleaze, called the usage “entirely inappropriate and anti-social”.

Hassan and Maryam Khaleghi, who claimed their neighbours had a “grudge” against them, had permission to build a two-bedroom family home or a house in multiple occupation (HMO) for no more than five tenants. But the couple listed the property on Airbnb for groups of up to ten people to stay in.

Hobhouse Close resident Les Rowe told Bristol24/7 that “groups and stag parties have been turning up at all hours of the night and into the early morning. Residents have continually been woken and children disturbed by shouting and the noise of car doors and boots being slammed. Subsequently, outdoor late-night parties, drinking and singing have been a regular feature.”

The property has since been taken off Airbnb after a planning inspector threw out the landlords’ appeal to grant permission for external alterations they wanted to make.

“Many attractive benefits” to short-term letting

You only have to consider the economics of the industry to see why a landlord might turn to Airbnb rather than the traditional private rented sector.

These rental markets are more lucrative than longer-term letting arrangements. A landlord will make a higher return on a short-term let than on a regular long-term let.

In Bristol, figures from Zoopla show that the average rent available for a landlord letting out a one-bedroom flat long-term is around £1,254 per month. This is a number which is growing by 12.9 per cent annually, according to the Bristol Living Rent Commission.

By contrast, as a short-term let, at an average of £165 per night, landlords stand to make £3,000 per month if their property is let out 60 per cent of the time, and £4,000 if the occupancy rate rises to 80 per cent.

Data from Inside Airbnb suggests the platform has moved away from homeowners making some extra cash from a spare room slept in by weary travellers and turned into a way for commercial landlords to increase their rental incomes from the housing market.

The site shows there are an increasing number of ‘hosts’ who manage multiple listings on the site.

Looking at just entire property lets with at least one review in the last 30 days, hosts with more than one property account for more than a third of properties despite being only 11 per cent of the users.

The ten most prolific hosts in Bristol manage 433 properties between them. Eight of the top-ten hosts openly advertise themselves as accommodation providers.

The largest ‘multiple-listing’ host is estate agent Hopewell, based on Hope Chapel Hill in Hotwells, with 150 ‘entire homes’ and four ‘private rooms’ listed on Airbnb.

Hopewell’s website claims landlords could be making 20 per cent more money by letting their property out on a short-term basis. The self-proclaimed experts in this area say there are “many attractive benefits” to short-term lets which are “becoming increasingly popular”.

Hopewell, other Airbnb management companies and individual Airbnb owners, did not respond to Bristol24/7 when we asked them to comment on the benefits of being an Airbnb host.

On the increasing professionalisation of Airbnb, a spokesperson for Airbnb said: “There is a big difference between occasionally sharing space in your home and running a hotel or accommodation business.

“People who host in their own home represent a category of accommodation that differs fundamentally from both professional accommodation providers and hotels.”

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One Cotham resident, who wants to remain anonymous, says they were given notice for their flat rental as their landlord had sold the property to a buy-to-let investor who planned to put it on Airbnb.

“I wonder why it’s such a struggle to find reasonable housing in Bristol? So many one-beds are now only for Airbnb, it’s awful,” they complain.

On the other end of the spectrum, some are trying to harness Airbnb’s lucrative platform as a force for good.

Homeless charity Emmaus built two eco-holiday pods in St Paul’s as a way to generate income for the charity, which is celebrating 25 years in Bristol.

Money brought in goes to providing “hope and a sense of belonging to those who have experienced poverty or homelessness”, the charity says.

The tourism sector’s view

Despite some innovative uses of Airbnb, many hoteliers echo the view that the platform is increasingly used by businesspeople who own or manage multiple properties.

“Unfortunately, that’s the way it kind of works now,” says Raphael Herzog, chair of Bristol Hoteliers Association (BHA), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting the interests of hoteliers in and around Bristol.

“It’s more investors and entrepreneurs that buy houses and convert them straightaway into short-lived accommodation.”

BHA has been proactive in expressing its grievances of short-term let companies like Airbnb, claiming the growth of Airbnbs has had a “profound” impact on the city’s smaller, independent hotels and bed and breakfasts, with some forced out of the market altogether.

“It suddenly boomed in Bristol in around 2017,” Herzog recalls. “We started to see an impact mainly in the city centre because corporates started using Airbnbs instead of hotels. Now, Airbnb’s impact across every kind of category for hotels, from an entry-level to luxury.”

On behalf of BHA, Herzog calls for Airbnb rooms to be regulated because they have an unfair competitive advantage in terms of taxes and regulatory requirements such as fire and other safety standards. Unlike hotels or even bed and breakfasts, homeowners do not have to prove their properties are safe before letting them out via holiday rental sites such as Airbnb.

“We’re never going to stop Airbnb,” Herzog adds. “But what we want is for it to be regulated much more.”

Qualms about lack of regulation are shared by Visit West, the local visitor economy partnership for Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

The tourism body’s research found that Bristol has one of the highest numbers of reservations for short-term lets in the UK – currently fourth behind London, Edinburgh and Liverpool.

Kathryn Davis, Visit West managing director, says: “The rise of online operators such as Airbnb and others means that not only can visitor accommodation pop up unregulated across the city but it is also almost impossible to track the number of properties unless investing a significant ongoing amount in research, as the apartments and rooms may only be available for a few days, or significantly longer.

“We have worked with operators of serviced apartments and similar for many years, and insist on quality controls before promoting properties through our channels. There are some exceptional lets in the city, and some properties will give options not available in traditional hotel stays, but our concerns are in both the volume and quality of experience.

“For some, the ability to rent a room or home will help that individual get by. Others may own multiple properties running as businesses without investing in the place therefore causing issues with neighbours or loss of communities.

“There are undoubtedly benefits for the region’s visitor economy in the growth of short-term lets, but unregulated growth can come at a cost, both in housing impact and quality control.”

“A perfect storm”

Numbers in Bristol are nowhere near as high as in seaside locations where as many as 20 per cent of dwellings are advertising as an Airbnb – a much bigger number than the 1.25 per cent of Bristol properties.

However, researchers believe comparisons can be drawn between Airbnb-dense areas like Cornwall and Devon and Bristol in terms of their housing problems.

There are more than 134,000 people currently renting privately in Bristol, which represents almost a third of the population. On average, Bristol residents now need almost nine times their annual salary to buy a house.

Adam Sheppard contributed to one of the only pieces of focused, academic research into the extent and impact of Airbnb and short-term letting in Bristol. He tells Bristol24/7 that controlling the growth of Airbnb is part of a much broader debate about the housing crisis.

“Airbnb adds to a perfect storm in Bristol,” says the lecturer in urban planning and design at the University of Gloucestershire.

“They are particularly notable here, just like coastal towns and cities and villages, because they are a factor in a city that’s experiencing multiple challenges associated with the housing industry.

“Bristol has a very limited supply of brownfield land. It’s surrounded by greenbelt, by floodplains and it’s very contained.

“It’s also a very desirable city with a young, diverse population. That makes it a city that is really challenged in its ability to supply the homes that it needs.”

The word Sheppard used to describe Airbnb’s role in Bristol in the paper is “disruptor”.

“The concern we found was that they were operating in a very different regulatory space, which meant that they didn’t have the same rules applying to them and there was a lack of ability to manage impact,” he explains.

“This is removing the local authority’s ability to predict and provide housing properly for its society and its community because what it hopes is being provided to market as a home for someone is taken off the market and is provided through Airbnb as something else.”

In a statement, Airbnb says: “We recognise the historic housing challenges in parts of the UK and want Airbnb to be part of the solution. We have long called for national regulations for short-term lets to be introduced and look forward to an update on the government’s consultations in due course.

“Ninety per cent of hosts in Bristol share just one listing, and do so for three nights a month on average. Nearly half say the extra income helps them afford the rising cost of living.”

Regulating Airbnb

Other cities around the world have taken a patchwork of steps to rein the company in. One of the most recent is New York where a new regulation called Local Law 18,  introduced in September, forces hosts to get approved by the city before they can list short-term, partial-home stays on sites like Airbnb.

It was illegal before this for landlords and residents to rent out their apartments by the week or the night to tourists or others in the city for short stays, but this was rarely enforced and lucrative so people did it anyway.

Airbnb opposed the new law, arguing it amounts to a “de facto ban” on its business. Hosts are also starting to fight back via a lobbying group of New York homeowners seeking to legalise short-term, entire-home rentals for one- and two-family homes.

The tough new rules appear to be working. Between August and October, the number of short-term rentals in the Big Apple plunged by 85 per cent, according to Inside Airbnb.

Other destinations are taking different approaches. Barcelona became the first European city to ban short-term private room rentals in 2021. Hosts are not permitted to rent out a room for less than 31 days. In Vienna from July 2024, homeowners will be limited to renting out individual units to tourists for a maximum of 90 days per year. In Amsterdam, hosts can only rent out their properties for a maximum of 30 nights per year. Anything above that requires a permit for short-term stays.

“My hands are tied”

Back in March 2022, Bristol mayor Marvin Rees spoke of the “wicked challenge” posed by property owners turning their houses and flats into Airbnb rentals.

But he says he does not have the same powers as London mayor Sadiq Khan, who continues to impose a restriction that entire properties can’t be rented out for more than 90 nights in a calendar year.

London’s 90-day limit, which has been the law since 2015, was created to curb the stream of professional hosts hoovering up housing stock and making a fortune out of listing properties on short-term rental platforms. But it has proved almost impossible to enforce.

Airbnb says it “welcomes regulation and has led calls for a UK host register”.

Speaking to Bristol24/7, Tom Renhard, cabinet member for housing delivery and homelessness, says he was aware of “the Airbnb issue” but the local authority needed more powers to be able to combat it.

“It’s something I’m concerned about in Bristol and that we need to monitor, obviously,” says Renhard, now also the Labour group leader at City Hall.

“We are noticing one of the things that some landlords may be doing is turning their properties to Airbnb and we are keeping that under review.

“But the real challenge for us is that we don’t have the powers to be able to do much about it at the moment.”

Renhard believes one thing the council can currently do to combat the rise of Airbnbs is focus on its house-building programme.

“We need to think about the mix and the balance of housing types and to really make sure that we get more social housing built in the city to address the housing crisis.

“As I set out early this year and next, we’re investing £1.8bn into building council homes over the next 30 years.”

Renhard adds: “My hands are tied but we will continue to lobby to make representations to national government about these issues.”

Change afoot?

Changes could be coming to how England regulates short-term lets and holiday homes commonly advertised on platforms like Airbnb.

Two government consultations which aimed to “give communities greater control over short-term lets in tourist hot spots” while also “strengthening the tourism sector” recently ended.

The first, led by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, proposed requiring hosts to get planning permission from their local councils to use a home for a short-term let. The second, led by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, proposed creating a register of all such properties in the country.

For Bristol, it means that Airbnb owners would have to get planning permission for their dwelling to be used as a short-term let, and for it to be recorded on a national register.

The changes would give Bristol City Council the power to refuse short-term lets if it is deemed that the properties are taking too much capacity away from the local housing market.

But long-term solutions are unlikely to be fast, and, in the meantime, the number of short-lets in Bristol continues to rise. It brings with it a sense of dread to Kilroe, who worries for the next generation of renters in the city.

“The housing situation is continuing to get worse,” Kilroe says. “So how will young people afford to live here?”

Main photo: Betty Woolerton

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