VANCOUVER—Just over 300 homes that were being rented on Airbnb full time were likely returned to Vancouver’s long-term rental market in the first four months of the city’s new regulations coming into force, according to new research from McGill University.

And if all 1,800 housing units that were listed as entire home, full-time listings prior to the regulations coming into effect in September 2018 were returned to the rental market, that would be enough to push the city’s notoriously low rental vacancy rate up by over one per cent, said David Wachsmuth, one of the authors of the study.

Overall, the study — titled “Short-term rentals in Canada: Uneven growth, uneven impacts” — calculated that 31,000 Canadian housing units listed on Airbnb were “rented frequently enough last year that they are unlikely to house a permanent resident.”

Wachsmuth used the same data-scraping methodology as a previous 2017 study he published, which found that commercial operators with many listings were generating the bulk of the revenue from Airbnb listings.

He said his team now has data from Airbnb listings across the globe and will be publishing more studies in the future.

Airbnb takes issue with Wachsmuth’s data-scraping work, calling it inaccurate.

“Without all the information, faulty assumptions are made about our hosts and how they use our platform,” wrote Lindsey Scully, a communications staffer for the company, in an email.

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Wachsmuth has previously called on the company to allow researchers to study its data.

In 2018, Vancouver’s rental vacancy rate was just one per cent — an improvement from previous years. It fell to as low as 0.7 per cent in 2016.

But as Vancouver listings dropped and long-term housing loss from short-term rentals slowed, short-term rental activity in other Metro Vancouver municipalities has grown.

Wachsmuth says the trend shows the need for provincial regulations, rather than a municipality-by-municipality approach.

“If you look at the rest of the (census metropolitan area), the full-time listings have accelerated,” said Wachsmuth, a professor at McGill’s School of Urban Planning. “It’s kind of two steps forward, one step back. Richmond and Surrey are now getting more of this activity.”

Cities across Canada have been grappling with how to regulate short-term rental sites like Airbnb, which city planners and academics say have removed housing that would otherwise be rented out long-term from the overall housing stock.

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The McGill research shows that entire home, full-time listings are growing the fastest in smaller towns and rural communities than in Canada’s big cities.

That should be a concern for smaller communities, especially in B.C., Wachsmuth said, where small towns are grappling with the same housing issues common in big cities and suburbs.

“The housing affordability and rental vacancy stats is systematically so much worse in B.C., including in the smaller communities, compared to the rest of the country,” Wachsmuth said.

Wachsmuth said his team’s data analysis shows that Vancouver’s regulations are among the most effective. Under the new rules, people who want to list their house or apartment as a short-term rental have to have a business licence from the city and can only get that licence for their primary residence.

In addition, Vancouver levies an empty-home tax of one per cent of a home’s assessed value if properties are left vacant for more than six months of the year. Homeowners can avoid paying the tax if they rent out their property.

It’s not perfect: Some listings still get posted without a business licence or with a duplicate licence. To date, the city currently has 734 licences flagged for further investigation and audit, written 498 tickets, referred 102 listings to court prosecution and revoked 57 licences.

Wachsmuth said provincial governments could enforce regulations more effectively.

“The province will just have dramatically more power to make sure your primary residence is your primary residence, because they have tax information,” he said.

After years of rampant short-term rental growth in cities like Montreal, Quebec recently passed new regulations. Under its new law, which will come into effect in the fall, people who want to rent a property as a short-term rental have to have a registration number issued by the provincial taxation authority, Revenu Quebec.

Regulating short-term rentals isn’t the only way to ease the housing crunch in Canada, Wachsmuth said, but he said it is a key piece of the puzzle.

“It’s crazy that we’d be encouraging the construction of new rental on one hand and letting a bunch of existing rental pour out the back of the truck, basically, into short-term rentals,” Wachsmuth said.

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