Greens Lord Mayor candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan reveals bold Airbnb rates plan

The Greens’ Brisbane Lord Mayor candidate has revealed a bold plan to “p*ss off” Airbnb hosts, sending them a “get stuffed, we don’t want you in this city” message via a potentially crippling financial move.

Greens Brisbane Lord Mayor candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan has vowed to “p*ss off” Airbnb hosts by slugging them with council rates 10 times higher than the amount long-term rental owners pay.

Mr Sriranganathan said the aggressive plan was aimed at deterring short stay investors and could bring an estimated 1000 properties back into the long-term rental market.

“Our goal here is to p*** off and scare away investors who would rather make money from Airbnb than make housing available to local residents,” he said.

“Our message to them is, ‘get stuffed, we don’t want you in this city’.”

Brisbane City Council last year introduced a separate transitory accommodation rates category for short-term rentals, with hosts now forking out 65 per cent more than residential property owners.

Greens Brisbane Mayor candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

It also introduced a self-reporting system to track short-stays in the city, with an online detection system that identified properties advertised on sites like Airbnb, Stayz and Booking.com for 60 days or more.

Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner said at the time that the rates increase had been designed to discouraging short stays while council awaited the results of a statewide review into impacts of Airbnb’s in Queensland.

That review was handed down in June, and found there was a lack of “detailed, widely available and accurate data” to track short stay properties in the state which limited the ability to test regulation effectiveness and the effect short stays had on housing affordability and supply.

While Brisbane City Council’s self-reporting system identified at least 990 short stay properties in the city, the review estimated more than 2200 properties were being used for short-stay.

Mr Sriranganathan said the Greens would look at strengthening council’s short-stay property identification system, including lower the number of minimum days properties could advertise on short-stay sites from 60 to 45 days per year, before owners were slapped with the exorbitant rates fees.

He said Brisbane needed to “get on top of the issue” ahead of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

“If we can ratchet up the rates on Airbnb investment properties, some of those investors will sell up, while others will switch to long-term local tenants,” he said.

“We don’t know exactly how many would switch from short-term to long-term rental, but we consider one thousand homes to be a conservative estimate.”