Department of Housing to issue Airbnb guidelines after planning decision

The Department of Housing is to issue guidelines to all local authorities to give them clarity when dealing with Airbnb properties.

The intervention comes after Bord Pleanála upheld a Dublin City Council decision that the owner of an apartment in Temple Bar in Dublin needs to apply for planning permission if they wish to continue to rent it out as an Airbnb short-term let.

Housing minister Simon Coveney said his department will contact local authorities individually outlining the Government’s position on Airbnb properties to give them “clarity”.

He said that, while he agrees with the decision, there is a need for his department to provide guidelines for chief executives of local authorities. Mr Coveney said there is a lack of clarity around the role AirBnB plays in the property market and this needs to be addressed. He said the best way to do this is through the planning system.

The housing minister said there is a difference between renting a room or a house out for a few weeks and those advertised as having a five-figure income derived from Airbnb with guests coming and going every few days.

He said this is effectively no different to hostel or band B-type accommodation: “Airbnb has a role to play in the broader property market but I think there needs to be clarity around what that role is, and at the moment I don’t think there is.”

Airbnb has some 3,300 properties listed in Dublin alone. It has more than 800,000 listings in 33,000 cities and 192 countries.

Deputy planning officer at Dublin City Council Mary Conway, said the ruling does not set a precedent and that any future cases will be site- specific: “One ruling does not necessarily apply across the board. In any other case that seems very similar or identical — that is where somebody has an apartment and is now letting it out on a continual basis as a holiday let and where they are not resident, then based on this ruling we will consider that would be a material change of use and therefore if permission has not been granted then that person then may be liable to enforcement proceedings.”

“If you’re doing it full-time on a continuous basis — in this case it was happening for upwards of a year — then we would consider that to be a material change of use,” she told RTÉ radio.

Ms Conway also confirmed Dublin City Council has received similar complaints and is assessing them: “Even before this decision was made, we in the planning department were preparing a submission to the department to ask them to update the planning legislation to allow for a much clearer differentiation between use as a residential apartment and use as a short-term holiday let.”

“We obviously have planning legislation at the moment but it doesn’t really clearly differentiate between an apartment and somebody using an apartment as a holiday let.

"That means when we take action and we have to go to the courts and we have to prove this we’re in a very weak position,” she said.

Lecturer in Housing and Urban Economics at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Lorcan Sirr, said the council needs a formal policy on the use of Airbnb usage in the city.

“Last time I looked during the summer, there were over 3,300 apartments in the middle of the city that were available on Airbnb. In the middle of a housing crisis that’s a significant number and arguably a driver of rents,” he told RTÉ.