The housing crisis and short-term rental accommodation In NSW, housing affordability and availability are at their lowest levels in decades. In response, the New South Wales Government is investigating policy levers to help unlock housing supply and ease the ongoing pressure on housing affordability across New South Wales (NSW). In February 2024, it published a Discussion paper on short-and long-term rental accommodationLinks to an external site..(*) According to the discussion paper, advertised prices for long-term rentals in NSW have increased more than [ Select ] ["12", "24", "38", "none of the options"] % since the end of 2019. As housing affordability in NSW has decreased, people have become concerned that owners are making fewer properties available for long-term use, and that this may be contributing to a rise in costs. Over the past decade, the emergence of online booking platforms such as Airbnb has made it easier for property owners to enter the short-term rental market instead. As of January 2024, there are about [ Select ] ["23,000", "33,000", "43,000", "none of the options"] dwellings registered for non-hosted short-term rental accommodation, representing approximately [ Select ] ["1", "5", "10", "none of the options"] % of the stock of private dwellings in NSW. Internationally, academic studies of short-term rental accommodation have suggested that a 1% increase in short-term rental listings has been found to increase rents by up to [ Select ] ["0.2", "0.34", "0.52", "none of the options"] %.