Latest / STR Unpacked / Airbnb Is Now Matching Data For The Government
Transcript
- Ben: Good morning and welcome to your short term mental bulletin on the 27th of July. So this is a really interesting story today, which actually came out on the 8th of July, but I haven't seen much coverage, so I wanted to cover it today. And that is that Airbnb is running data matching for the British government. So on the 8th of July, the Cabinet Office announced a data sharing partnership with Airbnb to catch people illegally subletting social hounding. So councils across London, plus Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Anglesey all opted to take part in this. So that's over 450,000 properties within the scope. 470 potential full cases have already been flagged. Now, the government estimates around 5,800 social homes in England are being sublet on short-term rental platforms at roughly £78,300 per case to the taxpayer. I think the details are really interesting on this. So read the privacy notices, and the traffic is not one way. So councils send tenancy records to Airbnb, Airbnb runs the match, and then the results come back. The government own notice states that Airbnb Island is providing a data matching service. That data is stored outside of the UK and Airbnb uses processes all around the world. Short-term rent data now sits inside of a national fraud matching system next to payroll benefits and electoral register. So two things matter here. On substance, this is the enforcement model that the sector has been asking for. Target actual fraud, leave legitimate supply alone. Set it against a blanket nightcaps and license freezers. It looks proportionate. But the plumbing is the real story. Once the platform data has a permanent pipe into the government matching engine, the question is no longer whether it gets used again, it's what is it going to get used for. So I think enforcement has really just got precise and obviously that precision cuts both ways. So thank you for watching and I'll see you tomorrow.