
Rise of ghost hotels casts pall over Toronto rental market - parthdesai
https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2019/04/22/rise-of-ghost-hotels-casts-pall-over-toronto-rental-market.html
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mtw
Isn't this related to a bigger problem which is lack of affordable housing?
Airbnb just exacerbates the problem. Many other cities are faced with the same
issue, London, NY, Paris. It's a city planning issue that mayors and
governments should tackle, not an Airbnb issue. If Airbnb leaves, it doesn't
mean that everyone will magically find cheap rental units.

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helen___keller
Right, it's one of many factors contributing to the absurdly low vacancy rate
(and resulting absurdly out-of-reach housing costs)

Presumably addressing this issue could be a multi pronged approach, which may
involve restrictions on airbnb. But i totally agree the city can't just ban
airbnb and call it a day - that would be unproductive at best

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philipov
high vacancy rate, or low occupancy rate

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helen___keller
Vacancy rate for standard long-term rental units, is absurdly low in toronto
(1.1%)

A low vacancy rate generally means that rentals are a seller's market - offer
a bad unit or a high price, or both, and you can easily find a tenant, because
there's just so few places to rent.

I believe a healthy vacancy rate for a city is in the 6-7 percent range. 1.1
percent is insanely low.

But, it's not terribly surprising. The story of housing in the 21st century is
that vacancy builds in the tiny manufacturing towns of yesteryear (much of the
Midwest USA for example) while people move en masse to a few superstar cities
that usually fail under overbearing regulations and zoning to build anywhere
near enough units to match the incoming migration.

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scld
All this means is that there's a demand for more housing, in one form or
another.

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NotSammyHagar
I thought a big reason for Airbnb's success is they are large enough that
they're now the go to site to find short-term housing. What's the non Airbnb
site that you go to? They're successful just because everyone goes there.

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skilled
The more the merrier. If this brings down prices for apartment rentals then I
am all for it. So many people are willing to leave their Airbnb apartments
empty for months at a time only to cash in on an absurd "premium".

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wolco
It increases the prices as supply is reduced overall.

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saemil
Anyone else read the subject as Toronto has a lot of haunted hotels?

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ksaj
No. Maybe if it was a reddit post.

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parthdesai
[https://outline.com/mHDHEM](https://outline.com/mHDHEM), if the article is
pay walled.

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Giorgi
What? Who the hell calls Short-term rentals "ghost hotels"?

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conanbatt
If it only came to the idea of the Toronto government to ban tourism, it would
achieve the same effect as reducing airbnb's.

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parthdesai
Absolutely not true, maybe look into the matter and data first before
commenting?

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conanbatt
What data do you want, that Airbnb is used by tourists?

There's plenty for it: [https://www.airbnbcitizen.com/airbnb-shares-new-data-
globall...](https://www.airbnbcitizen.com/airbnb-shares-new-data-globally-and-
starts-initiative-to-drive-healthy-tourism/)

~~~
parthdesai
TIL that tourism didn't exist before AirBnB. It's not like Toronto is some
scrub city that only saw tourists because of AirBnB.

~~~
conanbatt
All tourism raises rents. The less tourism, the lower the rents.

