City of Launceston Council Meeting Agenda

Council Motion Question 4

Question 4: Review the actual number of whole of properties and short term rental properties that currently exist in the short-term rental marketplace in the City of Launceston Council area on the various short term rental platforms

Response:

There are 31,274 private dwellings within the Launceston Local Government Area (LGA) as reported by census 2021 data.

In order to understand the complete picture of the housing market within Launceston it needs to be understood that there are a high number (2,315) of unoccupied dwellings, which consist of:

• All usual residents away from their dwelling on Census night;

• Unoccupied dwellings in self-contained retirement villages; and

• Non-residential premises and construction sites may have dwellings that are not habitable but are identified as unoccupied private dwellings.

There were also 1,042 dwellings which were categorised as 'Other tenure' which consists of:

• Tenure type not stated (560 dwellings); and

• Rent-free dwellings (482 dwellings), occupied under life tenure schemes and 'other tenure type(s)'.

Under the SSA Act, data is collected by CBOS and supplied in two forms: summary information which has been cleaned and deemed more accurate, and detail information which is less accurate (there are duplicates), but does have some location

Page 9/19 data which we have used to create representative maps of short stay accommodation. We have been in contact with CBOS requesting locations of the summary data, which would allow accurate maps to be created, but at the present time they are unable to do this, hence our maps are only indicative of the location of short stay accommodation.

From the Q2 2022 summary data provided by CBOS, there are 551 short term accommodation dwellings within Launceston LGA, of which 312 are not the owner's primary residence, in other words, an investment property. This corresponds to 1% of all private dwellings.

Using the Q1 2022 detail data from CBOS, approximately 39% of short stay accommodation listings are in central Launceston, and significantly fewer listings in suburban areas (refer Figure 3). Of particularly note is the high proportion of listings (10%) in Invermay. Anecdotally, this data includes listings that are no longer available on the platform.

Short stay accommodation providers and other websites provide additional data, outside the scope of CBOS, and based on real usage of the short stay dwelling. For example, from one of these sites, insideairbnb.com, we determined that 80% of short term rentals were for full homes/apartments, and it is reasonable to assume that this is the case for other short stay rental providers.