Airbnb, the housing market and the locals: disentangling the ‘Airbnbfication’ of Reykjavík

Anne-Cécile Mermet, lecturer in urban geography at Sorbonne Université in France gives a lecture titled „Airbnb, the housing market and the locals: disentangling the ‘Airbnbfication’ of Reykjavík

Summary

Just like Iceland, the city of Reykjavík has witnessed a significant tourism boom over the past decade. This boom has produced very visible changes in the city, through the construction of dozens of new hotels, the opening of new tourism attractions, or the renovation of the old harbor, but it has also produced more inconspicuous changes, such as the transformation of thousands of regular residential units into tourism rentals. The boom of tourism in Iceland has indeed coincided with the development of peer-to-peer short-term rental platforms, whose undisputed leader is Airbnb, and who use the power of digital intermediation to develop homestay to an unprecedented scale.  The success of this new form of accommodation is a major challenge for several reasons: legal, tax, safety issues, but also the question of its impact on local housing markets. This issue is particularly crucial in the Reykjavík capital area because the situation of the housing market in currently highly tense. Built on “tourism gentrification theory” (Gotham, 2005) and based on a mixed method protocol combining  (1) data analysis about the Airbnb supply and the real estate market and (2) interviews with Airbnb hosts and locals looking for a place to live, this research aims to shed some light on socio-spatial impacts of the Airbnbfication of Reykjavík by answering the following questions:

• What are the main features of the Airbnb supply in Reykjavík?
• Who are the Airbnb hosts and what are the reasons that push local people to participate in this market?
• What are the impacts of Airbnb on the situation of locals on the housing market?
• And, overall, does Airbnb smooth or exacerbate social inequalities?

Bio

Anne-Cécile Mermet is a lecturer in urban geography at Sorbonne Université in France. She holds a PhD from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in geography and urban studies. She is mostly interested in the contemporary social transformations of cities. She has worked on urban issues such as gentrification, retail geography or heritage management and she is currently working on the tourism-led transformations of Reykjavik. 

Since 2017, she has more specifically been carrying out a research project on the impact of Airbnb on the city centre of Reykjavik, partly funded by Ferðamálastofa and Íbúðalánasjóður. This research aims to provide an updated overview of the Airbnb supply in Reykjavik, to understand who are the Airbnb hosts, the reasons that push them to participate in this market and, eventually, to provide a clearer assessment of the impact of Airbnb of the situation of local people on the housing market.