How To Save Cape Town From Airbnb: Will City’s Solution Work?

Of this working well. Can you talk us through what that primary resident requirement is? Just to be clear, this is something the city has not put into their proposed law. Yeah. So the primary residence requirement is the fourth pillar of effective regulation of Airbnb across the world. And that comes from Inside Airbnb, who are a great data project that I've mentioned a few times. And they've collaborated a lot with us and helped us understand what ways it has been regulated elsewhere. And that primary residence requirement effectively says you can Airbnb.

But it has to be your place of residence. So it has to be your spare room. It has to be the cottage in the back. It can be your whole home for five months of the year. If you're gonna go have your summer holiday in Europe, that's totally okay. But it means that you can't have one operator owning 215 properties. It distributes the ownership and the business manager effectively of that Airbnb to being the individual person or family who own their property and are trying to make a little bit more.

More off of that. So that is our biggest request, effectively, of the bylaw is that it doesn't speak to anything that limits the amount of houses taking off of the long-term rental stock. And a primary residence requirement would necessarily return a lot of those units to the long-term rental stock because that operator who has 215 will now only be able to have one and they've got to live in it for some parts of the year. How has it worked out in Vancouver? Didn't they do it a number of years ago? It's not that recent. Yeah, they did.

It quite a while ago, and I think they're still studying it. I think the impact of these things and how it impacts both the economy, the tourist economy, as well as rental is a longitudinal study. But our understanding so far is it's saved on average about $149 Canadian dollars a month, I think, on rent on average. And I'm not, I don't have those numbers top of mind, but it's definitely returned.