Short-Term Let Licensing Implementation Update Report 2024

References

1 2018-19 Programme for Government

2 Public Consultations about the regulation of short-term lets in Scotland

3 Membership of the Industry Advisory Group is published on the VisitScotland website

4 Society of Local Authority Lawyers & Administrators in Scotland | SOLAR (solarscotland.org.uk)

5 Convention of Scottish Local Authorities

6 Short Term Accommodation Association

7 Community Land Scotland

8 Association of Scotland’s Self-Caterers

9 Scottish Tourism Alliance

10 Living Rent

11 The Cockburn Association

12 The Fringe Society

13 Festivals Edinburgh

14 The Scottish Bed & Breakfast Association

15 HomeLink

16 Home Exchange

17 PLACE Edinburgh

18 Scottish Federation of Housing Associations

19. Scottish Local Authorities Economic Development Group (SLAED)

20 Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics Scotland to 31 December 2023 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

21 The official statistics also collect data about the number of units and the maximum occupancy per application. As accommodations units are not required information in the 2022 Order, the data collection is incomplete. Maximum accommodation, however, is required under the Order, and the data is virtually complete (0.1% omissions likely due to data entry errors). Information on maximum occupancy is presented in Table 1.

22 The number of listings associated with a particular short-term let unit is also not a fixed relationship, e.g. a whole house might be let differently throughout the year with listings for the entire premises during certain months and then separate listings for individual bedrooms within the same house for other months.

23 Existing hosts are hosts that used their accommodation as a short-term let prior to 1 October 2022.

24 Additional Scottish Government analysis of data in Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics Scotland to 31 December 2023.

25 See Chart 2 in Short Term Lets Licensing Statistics Scotland to 31 December 2023.

26 Research into the impact of short-term lets on communities across Scotland

27 Inside Airbnb provides publicly available information about Airbnb listings across the world based on scraped data.

28 Indigo House research – see section 2 methodologies

29 Airbnb UK Insights Report 2018

30 The data provided by Airbnb, along with the independent research, was referenced in the Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment which accompanied the short-term lets Licensing Order.

31 In the independent research, a listing was regarded as active if it had an update in the last 6 months – see Table 2 and surrounding text in Appendix 1. The Airbnb submission referred to “the number of active listings over a year long period” – see footnote 6 on Page 5 of the Airbnb submission.

32 ONS, Short-term lets through online collaborative economy platforms, UK.

33 UK short-term rentals | VisitBritain.org

34 Data is provided for Scotland’s 41 LAUs as well as an additional area ‘Scotland other’ which captures those listings that cannot be attributed to an LAU with the information available.

35 In order to identify identical listings across more than one platform, Lighthouse firstly use a ‘photomatcher’, which can look past cropping and minor edits, to detect duplicated photos. A machine learning binary classifier is then used which examines the features of the properties, details of how and when listings were made, and the photos in order to make a decision as to whether it is the same property or not. The classification model’s approach has been validated and improved by ‘training’ based on decisions made by real people.

36 This data is not yet publicly available but is expected to be published by VisitScotland later in 2024.

37 The number of licences is not identical to indicators contained in other short-term let datasets, such as the number of hosts or number of listings.

38 2021 Business Regulatory Impact Assessment

39 See Table 1 which shows the prevalence of different licence types and occupancy levels based on applications that have been received and validated by 31 December 2023. Because local authority fee schedules can differ in how different categories of properties are defined, some assumptions have to be made to compare fees across local authorities; in particular, where a local authority sets fees based on the number of rooms, it is assumed for the purposes of comparison that the maximum occupancy of a room is two people.