Tourism slump in Dublin brings relief to rental market
“I remember every day I was given around 60 properties — and once this kicked in, it literally doubled.”
—Shaun Gribben, apartment hunter
The modern one-bedroom Dublin apartment featured an open-plan living space, a sun-soaked balcony, solar panels, ample storage space and parking for two cars. The location was ideal, as was the price: about $1,800 a month — $300 less than the previous tenant had paid.
In a city where lines to view rental properties have regularly trailed around the block, the new tenants could hardly believe their luck.
“We were not going to get this place,” Aoife Brannigan, 25, said of the months of fruitless searching that she and her partner, Shaun Gribben, 25, had undertaken before landing the apartment. “I couldn’t see it happening had this not happened. We 100% benefited from this.”
The “this” she was referring to was the coronavirus, which has sent a chill through Ireland’s once-frenzied housing market, particularly Airbnb listings, which have been hit by a collapse in tourism. That drop, along with an exodus of people from overseas leaving Dublin because of the pandemic, has created a surge in available rental properties in the Irish capital — a shift that underscores how Airbnb’s presence continues to influence housing prices in popular cities.
For Dublin, the change has relieved a crunch that in recent years sent rents skyrocketing and left many struggling to afford a place to live. The situation was so fraught that in February, voters in search of affordable housing and greater tenant rights set off shock waves in national elections by ousting the traditional governing parties.
When Brannigan and Gribben began their search in earnest at the start of the year, he said, “I remember every day I was given around 60 properties — and once this kicked in, it literally doubled.”
For years, homes rented out on Airbnb for shortterm stays drained the supply of the Dublin area’s rental market, rising from about 1,700 full-home listings in 2016 to over 4,500 this year just before the coronavirus crisis, according to Inside Airbnb, a site that tracks listings in cities around the globe.
But during the pandemic that trend has reversed, with such listings declining to about 3,900 during August, a deceptively small shift that has had an outsize effect.
From May to July, longterm rental listings in the city were nearly 50% above the same period last year — an increase of more than 1,000 rental homes — despite a 1.5% fall in the rest of the country, according to a report by Ronan Lyons, an assistant professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin, for the Irish real estate website Daft.ie.
An Airbnb spokesman disputed the Inside Airbnb data, saying that most hosts around the world planned to rent their units at least at prepandemic levels once the coronavirus subsides, and added that the share of bookings in big European cities had recently rebounded.
While some workers have moved out of urban areas while working-from-home practices are in place and some from overseas returned, experts attribute much of Dublin’s abrupt rise in listings for long-term rentals to the drop in Airbnb listings.