Studios Earn £2,000/Month Long-Term Or £4,692 On Airbnb; The Council Cannot Fix This Alone
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat contribute reporting from somewhere within the M25.
Camden Council has now confirmed that approximately 6,000 entire homes in the borough are operating as full-time short-term holiday lets, removed from the long-term rental market for the substantial commercial benefit of their owners. According to research by Central London Forward, the figure across London is 117,000 listed homes, of which more than 43,000 operate continuously as short-term lets.
The Math
The math, courtesy of Camden Council‘s own reporting, is brutal. A one-bedroom studio in Camden could earn approximately £2,000 per month on the long-term private rental market. The same studio, on Airbnb at full occupancy, could earn up to £1,173 per week. £4,692 a month versus £2,000 a month is, as my landlord-economist friend describes it, “the kind of arbitrage that ends arguments at dinner parties.”
The result is what economists call supply withdrawal and what people in Kentish Town call where did all the flats go.
The Council Position
Camden’s housing budget, agreed in January, will see council rents rise 4.8 percent from 1 April 2026, plus a possible additional £2 per week if the government’s rent convergence policy goes through. The increase will raise £8.1m to £10.4m, all reinvested in Camden’s housing stock.
The council can do many things. It cannot, on its own, prevent the conversion of long-term rentals into short-term holiday lets. That requires national legislation, which the previous government promised, the current government has been studying, and Airbnb has been lobbying against, for approximately the same length of time it would have taken to actually fix the problem.
What Will Happen
What will happen, on current trajectory, is what has happened in Edinburgh, in Lisbon, in Barcelona, and in San Francisco. Long-term rental supply will continue to contract. Rents will continue to rise. The political pressure will, at some point, force a national licensing scheme, which will be watered down by Airbnb’s lobbying, which will then be circumvented by individual operators, which will then prompt another wave of stronger regulation in five years. This is the policy cycle for short-term-let regulation in basically every major Western city. We are, in London, somewhere around year three of a fifteen-year cycle.
What I Tell My Friends
What I tell my friends, when they ask me whether to take on a thirty-year mortgage in Highbury or just give up and move to Margate, is that I am not a financial advisor. What I am is a journalist who has watched two friends move to Margate and write me increasingly elaborate emails about how nice it is. The emails are getting longer. The Margate option, as far as I can tell, is genuinely working out.
For more visit my author page and read prat.uk. See also The Poke.
