Crack down on short-term letting but we need more hotels
PROPERTY
Property Insights with Johnny Gannon, Fair Deal Property
Something has gone wrong with how Ireland accommodates its visitors. Across the West of Ireland, residential properties are listed on Airbnb while hotels in regional towns sit closed to the travelling public, repurposed for long-term residential placements. Houses built for families are hosting tourists. Hotels built for tourists are housing long-term residents. We have inverted the entire logic of accommodation, and government policy is addressing only one half of that inversion.
The new short-term letting register, due to launch in December, is serious legislation. Anyone offering paid stays of up to 21 nights must register with Fáilte Ireland and demonstrate planning compliance. Platforms that allow unregistered properties to advertise face penalties of up to two per cent of global turnover. That is a very large number, and the platforms know it.
Operating a residential property as a de facto hotel without planning permission is a breach and should be regularised. Rules exist for good reason.
But the legislation misses a larger truth. The reason so many residential properties drifted into the short-term market is not bad faith on the part of property owners. It is rational behaviour in a market that has failed to provide adequate tourism accommodation, particularly in rural and coastal areas. Along the Wild Atlantic Way, through Connemara and out to the islands, tourism demand is real, sustained, and growing. The professional, purpose-built accommodation to meet it was never built in sufficient volume.
Across North Galway and the wider region, hotels that should form part of that tourism infrastructure have been absent from the visitor market for years, absorbed into other accommodation uses. That has tightened the supply of legitimate visitor beds precisely where demand is strongest. When hotel supply contracts and visitor numbers continue to grow, the market finds an alternative. The alternative it found was the residential housing stock. You cannot blame individual property owners for responding rationally to a gap the tourism sector itself failed to fill.
The honest answer is more hotels. Purpose-built, professionally operated, in the locations where visitors actually want to stay. Build sufficient capacity and the commercial incentive for informal short-term letting diminishes naturally. The market rebalances without a compliance regime that local authorities have repeatedly struggled to enforce.
Enforcement without supply is not a strategy. Ireland needs both.
For more visit www.fairdealproperty.ie.