Landlords face Airbnb ban from next year to tackle housing crisis

Landlords will be facing an Airbnb ban from next year in a bid to tackle Ireland's housing crisis.

Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy has said the law change will regulate short-term accommodation most often used for tourism and free up more longterm accommodation for the rental sector. The move is directed at landlords who are switching their properties from longterm agreements to short-term. These landlords will no longer be able to arrange to rent a property for a short-term period, unless this property has already been approved for such purposes. Landlords will be permitted to apply for permission to rent short-term but it is "unlikely" that these requests will be approved in areas of high rental demand. Speaking on RTE's Morning Ireland today, Murphy said that the move was an "emergency response." He said:

"Some of our cities, for example Limerick,  are seeing very high rent inflation but they don't qualify to be a rent pressure zone because the qualifying criteria is laid out in a particular way. "We estimate from the data we've seen that somewhere from 1,000 to 3,000 homes in the Greater Dublin area that might come back into the market for long-term letting, which is very very important."

Private homeowners will still be permitted to offer rooms for short term accommodation for up to 90 days in a year or 14 consecutive days. The changed law is expected to come into effect on June 1, 2019. If landlords fail to adhere to these new laws they will face criminal conviction.