Shave 20 Years Off Your Mortgage

The fat profit margins Airbnb hosts can reap on their properties are proving more attractive than the money Aussie investors can make as traditional landlords, a new study has found.

A new global index comparing how long it took to make back the value of a property via Airbnb versus the conventional rental market named Sydney, Perth and Melbourne in the top 50 global cities where owners could recoup costs quicker via the sharing platform.

The data, from London-based online estate agent Nested, shows a three-bedder in Sydney — one of the most expensive cities on the list in terms of both average prices and rents — would take 315 months, or about 26 years, to pay back if renting it out to traditional tenants. The same property would take just under seven years to pay off via Airbnb rates.

In Perth, it is about 24 years as a normal landlord versus seven years as a host, while in Melbourne, it would take 25 years as a landlord or 10 years as a host for investors to make the return on their investment. The data looked at the average 12 month price of an Airbnb rental and assumed the property would be rented 80 per cent of the time.

Brisbane ranked 57th of the 75 cities researched; it would take 22 years as a landlord and 12.5 years as a host for a recoup the purchase cost.

Durban in South Africa topped the list as the fastest city worldwide to recover property prices via Airbnb, at 18 months.

First published in The Domain 24 January 2017