Puerto Rico Short-Term Rental Growth Exacerbates Housing Crisis: Report
Photo Credit: An Airbnb in Rincon, Puerto Rico. A new report ties an increase in short-term rental listings with rising rents and home prices. Skift / Dennis Schaal
Skift Take
Puerto Ricans aren't merely imagining that Airbnb and Vrbo have transformed their neighborhoods — sometimes negatively. Here's a report that quantifies the housing impact.
A new study on the impact of short-term rentals in Puerto Rico, where the proliferation of Airbnb listings played an outsized role in its tourism recovery following Hurricane Maria, found that a 10 percent increase in short-term rental density in relation to the total number of housing units, led to a 7 percent increase in median rents and a 23 percent jump in housing unit prices.
The Center for a New Economy study used AirDNA and other data to assess short-term rental trends and their impact in Puerto Rico from 2014 to 2020. The backdrop is that Puerto Rico faces a housing crisis that includes a lack of affordable housing, as well as increasing rents, foreclosures and evictions as short-term rentals have proliferated, according to the study. The Center for a New Economy stated that hurricanes and earthquakes damaged more than 300,000 apartments and homes in Puerto Rico since 2017, exacerbating the crisis.
"The large proportion of entire homes listed on short-term rental platforms signals that there are a significant number of housing units that are outside of the traditional housing market and thus unavailable for long-term rental clients," the report found. "This is particularly worrisome in Puerto Rico given rising housing costs and the limited number of units available in certain submarkets."
The Puerto Rico gover
