Pop-up brothel shock for Airbnb’s neighbours

AMAN in Bristol has told how he discovered a neighbouring flat in his building had been turned into a pop-up brothel – thanks to his recently installed doorbell camera.

The man, known as Matt, told ou sister website Bristol Live he realised an apartment in his converted Victorian house was being used for sex trade, just hours after three women moved in one weekend.

The neighbouring flat in well-todo Redland is let out through the Airbnb platform, and Matt said he is used to seeing different people regularly coming and going, but not to the scale he saw one weekend earlier this month. He said that on one Saturday morning he noticed three women had arrived to stay in the neighbouring Airbnb, but something wasn’t quite right at all.

“We noticed they kept leaving the main entrance door to the building on the latch, so people could just walk in, so I kept going out to close it,” he said.

That might have been annoying enough, but Matt noticed something else – there were a lot of different men coming and going. We’ve just had a ring doorbell put in recently so I looked on there to see what was going on, and it was guy after guy, always different,” he said.

Matt counted at least 15 different men visiting in less than 24 hours from Saturday lunchtime to Sunday morning.

By the Sunday morning, the other residents had had enough, and Matt contacted the owner of the flat, or Airbnb ‘host’.

“He said he’d call Airbnb, and I provided video and screenshots of all the guys who came and left. The women were due to stay until Tuesday, but ended up leaving that Sunday evening. He’s obviously got them removed as they just left on Sunday evening,” he added.

Matt said he contacted Avon and Somerset Police via the 101 number, and a call handler said they would log the report for intelligence purposes, but he has heard nothing back. The experience for the Redland residents is the latest incident involving Airbnb properties, which were described as a “wicked challenge” by Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees in 2022.

It is thought that as many as 1,500 empty homes in the city are lost to Airbnb, with the number of whole houses and flats being let out through the website increasingly rapidly, because owners who had been renting their properties out on traditional longer lets to people who actually lived there as tenants were instead choosing to turn them into Airbnb to avoid increasing regulation as landlords.

Last week, communities minister Michael Gove announced that future short-term lets – whether through Airbnb or another holiday let system – would require planning permission, but the crackdown would not include existing holiday homes. A new “planning use class” of shortterm lets would be created, but any homes that already are such lets would automatically be granted that planning permission required.

Using holiday homes or city-based Airbnbs as pop-up brothels is a growing issue for police. Five years ago, Avon and Somerset Police warned that it had begun to be a phenomenon in Bristol and Bath and in more rural areas of Somerset, and was a key part of the modern day slavery trade. Police said organised crime bosses trafficked women into the UK and then around the country, with the practice a lot harder to track and disrupt than in illicit but static brothels and massage parlours.

Sgt Emma Slade, who is responsible for policing prostitution in Avon and Somerset – both on the streets and in properties, including ‘pop-up brothels’ – said the women working in them are very often slaves and being exploited, having been brought into this country from abroad with false promises.

Sgt Slade called on those who are renting out their homes through Airbnb and similar sites to make extra checks and satisfy themselves that the people they are renting to are legitimate.