A senior Mayo County Council official has said that the short-term letting website, Airbnb, has done ‘untold damage’ to Mayo’s rental housing stock
Tom Gilligan, Mayo County Council’s Director of Services for Housing, said it was ‘morally wrong’ for people to let entire properties on Airbnb.
According to the website Inside Airbnb, there are 1,134 entire properties in Mayo listed on Airbnb. This represents 76.2 per cent of the 1,489 listings on the website, which allows property owners to rent a room or an entire property on a short-term basis. In contrast, there were 39 Mayo properties listed for long-term letting on Daft.ie on Wednesday, December 11.
“Personally I have no problem if people want to rent a room on the Airbnb. Where I do have a problem and I do think it’s morally wrong, is where you see entire properties going up on Airbnb,” Mr Gilligan told a meeting of Mayo County Council’s Housing Special Policy Committee.