Speculation shouldn't drive up the price of rent. If anything, it should drive rents down because more units will be built to satisfy speculators which will then be contributed to the pool of available rental housing.
We saw this during the housing bubble: rents were detached from the price of housing and stayed low.
The problem here is that short term rental brings more revenue than long term rental. Before Airbnb you had to be a hotel to offer short term rental, so most landlords stayed out of that business and stuck to long term rental even though there's less revenue per unit.
But with Airbnb you can take your units out of the long term rental pool and put them in the short term rental pool, and because regulation has been slow to catch up, you don't have to take on the regulatory burden of being a hotel to do so.
Fewer units in the long term rental pool obviously, then, causes rents to go up.
Given that Airbnb makes units more valuable (by converting them to short-term rental and increasing the expected cashflow), they would of course then be more attractive to investors and that is perhaps part of the increase in housing prices in Vancouver. But even in that case the causality is increased rental cashflow driving up prices, rather than vice versa.
We saw this during the housing bubble: rents were detached from the price of housing and stayed low.
The problem here is that short term rental brings more revenue than long term rental. Before Airbnb you had to be a hotel to offer short term rental, so most landlords stayed out of that business and stuck to long term rental even though there's less revenue per unit.
But with Airbnb you can take your units out of the long term rental pool and put them in the short term rental pool, and because regulation has been slow to catch up, you don't have to take on the regulatory burden of being a hotel to do so.
Fewer units in the long term rental pool obviously, then, causes rents to go up.
Given that Airbnb makes units more valuable (by converting them to short-term rental and increasing the expected cashflow), they would of course then be more attractive to investors and that is perhaps part of the increase in housing prices in Vancouver. But even in that case the causality is increased rental cashflow driving up prices, rather than vice versa.