Rent is skyrocketing in Australia. Is Airbnb responsible for driving up prices?

Rental prices in many parts of Australia are growing 10% or even 20% year on year, leaving people in parts of the country struggling to find housing, especially in regions hit by natural disasters.

This has in turn led to questions over the almost 1m dwellings vacant on census night around Australia, and the role of short-term rentals in driving up rents, such as those leased on platforms like Airbnb.

Here, we take a look at where the highest concentration of Airbnb properties are, where rents have spiked the most, and which areas had the highest amount of vacant properties on census night, and if any of these three are correlated.

Broadly speaking, experts say there are a number of factors that could be affecting short-term rental, rent prices and empty properties.

A Guardian Australia analysis of Airbnb locations and rental prices for each postcode showed no overall correlation between rent increases and Airbnb density, with only a few areas overlapping with both high Airbnb density and high rental increases.

But if you look at postcodes surrounding Byron the numbers of short-term rentals drop significantly, even in ones that have seen bigger increases in long-term rental prices.

Many of the areas with a lot of short-term rentals also had a large percentage of empty homes on census night 2021. This makes sense given a lot of the dwellings vacant on census night are likely holiday homes, and the census was taken when various states were restricting travel.