Aaron Webb's street has a dozen Airbnbs.

He and his partner — a teacher at a local school — rent metres near the beach on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. 

In June, the region had 13,000 short-term stays but fewer than a thousand homes to rent, according to data from Queensland University and SQM Research. 

Mr Webb fears they'll be pushed out when their lease ends. 

It's what planner and social economist Peter Phibbs calls "the worst of both worlds" — a holiday destination with a year-round job market. 

Stayz corporate affairs director Eacham Curry calls it the "coal face". 

 Mr Webb says the houses around him are empty in the off-season, which is hard to see in such a competitive rental market.

"Or do they really tighten it up, and go 'hang on a minute, you can't just have these houses vacant for months of the year when we've got people struggling to find places to rent'."

Across Australia renters are facing record-high rents and low vacancy rates, but how much platforms like Stayz and Airbnb are to blame depends on who you ask, and how you interpret the data.

'The worst of both worlds'

There were just 754 vacancies on the Sunshine Coast in June this year, according to SQM Research. 

In the same month there were 5,974 entire homes listed on Airbnb, according to data scraped from its website by Inside Airbnb, a data project that tracks the platform around the world. 

"It's probably the worst of both worlds, it's the holiday market and a lot of people live there," Peter Phibbs, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney and Housing Justice Data Lab board member, says. 

"So, where you've had shift from that long-term market to the short-term market means the vacancy rate tends to shrink, and rents tend to go up."

Short-term lets make up about 8 per cent of the Sunshine Coast's housing stock, according to research by the University of Queensland. 

Urban geographer and Associate Professor Thomas Sigler says that tracks with other tourism hotspots like Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, Central Coast in NSW and Margaret River in Western Australia. 

Nationally it's about 2 per cent, although that includes many purpose-built holiday lets. 

It gets down to philosophy

The number of short-term lets on the Sunshine Coast has dropped since 2019, Dr Sigler says.

The vacancy rate on the Sunshine Coast reached a record low in 2020 at 0.4 per cent, compared to 1.4 per cent in June this year. 

Dr Sigler says the housing crisis has deeper roots than new platforms to spruik short-term lets. 

"It goes right down to the sort of philosophical underpinnings of home ownership and whether a human being should be allowed to own one or even two or three properties," he says. 

Dr Sigler's research identified more than 13,000 short-term lets on the Sunshine Coast, about 11,500 of them entire homes. 

A population boom has added 80,000 people to the Sunshine Coast in the 10 years to 2021, most of them from within Australia. To keep up with demand, the region needs about 3,300 homes a year.

Dr Sigler says if every one of the entire homes for short-term let were converted it would only satisfy three years' growth, and "kill the tourism economy". 

Noosa Council planner Richard MacGillivray says short-term letting is "absolutely" affecting the rental market. 

In the two local government areas that make up the Sunshine Coast, the number of new rental bonds lodged has dropped, while rent has increased. 

It's also frustrated the people who live there year-round, Mr MacGillivray says. 

"Holiday letting has been something that's been done for awhile. What we have seen with the arrival of Airbnb and Stayz is an increase in the uptake, particularly in our residential areas," he says. 

In 2022 the Noosa Council brought in a short-stay local law which requires short-term lets to apply for council approval, and a yearly renewal. 

There's also a 60-day cap on some lets — like what's about to be introduced in in Byron Bay — but unlike in NSW, it's not legislated, or applied retrospectively. 

In the Sunshine Coast local government area higher rates apply to short-term lets, where they make up about 4 per cent of housing stock. 

The council says it's also investigating opportunities for social and affordable housing on council properties, and a new planning scheme that'll look at housing affordability.

Mr Curry says turning over the kinds of properties let on Stayz to the long-term market won't help affordability. 

"Properties of the kinds that we let, let at a price point that they would never make up part of the affordable housing mix, so if what you're intending to do is to try and shut that down, you're simply going to curtail the economic benefit," he says. 

However, Professor Phibbs disagrees. He says even top-end homes entering the market have a "filter down effect". 

"When you provide some expensive stock, it still has an impact on the bottom of the market because when you're locked out, you move down," he says. 

Coalface on the coast

Both Airbnb and Stayz support a state registration of short-term lets — which the Queensland government has committed to. 

But they don't support caps on the number of nights a property is let, like what's now legislated in New South Wales. 

"I've got lots of sympathy for the local councils of the Sunshine and Gold Coasts because they're at the coalface of having to try and manage these new issues, and that's why we partner with them," Mr Curry says. 

Mr MacGillivray wants the bigger platforms to be "good corporate citizens" and put money back into the communities where they're most concentrated through affordable housing or homes for key workers. 

Stayz encourages owners where there's "social need" to hand over their property like in floods or fire but can't "dictate" what they choose to do, Mr Curry says.