Blaming Airbnb for Queenstown rents lets the real culprit off the hook

Queenstown has spent the best part of a decade looking for someone to blame for its rents, and Airbnb has been the easiest target. A new study reported by the Otago Daily Times suggests the district has been aiming at the wrong thing. Short-term letting makes up more than 40% of Queenstown Lakes’ visitor accommodation, the study finds, but its effect on housing affordability is limited.

That combination matters. Short-term rentals are now core tourism infrastructure, not a fringe side hustle. Treating them as the cause of a housing crisis they did not create risks damaging the visitor economy while leaving the actual shortage untouched.

The evidence has pointed one way for years

The new findings do not land in a vacuum. Back in 2024, Infometrics analysis found short-term rental accommodation added just 35 cents a month to rent increases in Queenstown-Lakes between January 2018 and September 2023. Over the same period, population growth drove roughly $101 a week of rent growth.

Brad Olsen, then Infometrics chief executive, said at the time that “STRA only had a limited influence on rents and no real influence on house prices” and that “the New Zealand housing market fundamentally suffers from a lack of supply.”

Sceptics dismissed that work because Airbnb was connected to the commission. The council did not. A January 2025 Queenstown Lakes District Council report confirmed it had the analysis independently peer-reviewed by Market Economics, which found it robust. The same report described short-term and long-term rentals as “largely discrete markets with limited substitutability.”

Empty homes predate the apps

The argument that refuses to die is about empty houses, and the numbers are genuinely striking. In January 2026, the NZ Herald reported that 2023 Census data showed more than one in four private dwellings in the district were unoccupied, against a national rate of 10.8%. Council monitoring cited in that report put short-term accommodation at about 12% of housing stock at any one time.

But the vacancy pattern is old. The 2025 council report noted 28% of homes were unoccupied on 2018 census night, compared with 30% in 2006, before short-term letting platforms were a factor. Queenstown has always been a holiday-home town. Conflating baches with Airbnb muddies a debate that needs clarity.

Covid provided an accidental experiment. University of Auckland research published in 2025 found Queenstown’s property values rose on the back of economic growth, infrastructure upgrades and demand “rather than Airbnb alone,” and noted that even when short-term rentals collapsed during lockdown, “Queenstown still had a severe shortage of long-term rentals.” Take the tourists away and the shortage stayed. That is about as close to proof as housing economics gets.

Where the effect actually bites

None of this means short-term letting has zero effect everywhere. A 2026 paper presented at the CAUTHE conference, using 1,853 long-term rental listings from 2017 to 2025, found a 10 percentage point rise in nearby short-term rental density was linked to a 2.3% rise in townhouse rents but a 3.84% fall in apartment rents, with near-zero effect on standalone houses. Concentrations of luxury listings were associated with an 8.78% rent rise.

The researchers drew the right conclusion: “Uniform regulations are blunt instruments.” If council wants to act, it should target multi-unit buildings and corporate portfolios where impacts concentrate, not hit every family that lets out a spare property for summer.

Queenstown already runs a 90-night cap on unhosted listings and commercial rates 25-80% higher than residential. Even housing advocates were cautious about tightening further. In 2025, Julie Scott, then chief executive of the Queenstown-Lakes Community Housing Trust, said there was no silver bullet and argued for density instead: “we need to go up, not out.”

What this means for operators and councils

For property investors, letting managers and the tourism businesses that rely on that 40% share of beds, the new study is welcome confirmation that the regulatory threat rests on weak foundations. Visitors who stay in short-term rentals spend in local restaurants, bars and activity operators. Squeezing that supply would cost the district real revenue for little measurable housing gain.

For councils nationally weighing their own short-term letting rules, the lesson is simpler. Popular villains make for easy bylaws, but the data keeps pointing elsewhere: zoning, density, consenting speed and infrastructure funding. Those are harder, slower and politically less satisfying than a crackdown on Airbnb hosts. They are also the only things that will actually move Queenstown rents.

The district now has years of peer-reviewed evidence telling it the same thing. The test is whether council spends its next planning cycle building homes or chasing headlines.

Sources

• Otago Daily Times: New study says Airbnb not the housing villain (2026-11-14)
• Infometrics: New analysis finds short-term rentals have little influence on rents and house prices in New Zealand (2024-07-23)
• The Post: Airbnb not to blame for rent increases – Infometrics (2024-07-23)
• NZ Herald: Queenstown housing boom leaves rentals lagging as homes sit empty or move to Airbnb (2026-01-17)
• University of Auckland: Airbnb could actually be good for us (2025-04-09)
• The Spinoff: Lessons for Wellington from the councils that have tried to regulate Airbnb (2025-04-04)