Over 5000 Amsterdam homes permanently rented on Airbnb despite housing crisis

Amsterdam is home to at least 6 thousand illegal Airbnb rentals - homes and rooms rented out to tourists on the site that don't comply with Amsterdam's rules on house sharing, Trouw reports based on studies by Amsterdam data analyst Nico van Gog and Airbnb data expert Murray Cox from New York.

Nearly 5 thousand homes are permanently or nearly permanently rented on the house sharing site. This breaks Amsterdam's rule of not renting your home out for more than 60 days per year, and means that these homes are withdrawn from the housing market. The other around 1 thousand homes don't comply with other Amsterdam rules, like not renting a home to more than 4 tourists at a time.

"We have a housing shortage here, the queues are gigantic and house prices are only increasing", Amsterdam housing alderman Laurens Ivens said to the newspaper in response to this research. "I want to prevent our homes being hijacked and people making a lot of money from it."

Earlier this year the city of Amsterdam implemented an obligation to report any listing on Airbnb or similar sites. People who do not report renting their homes out to tourists, can be fined 6 thousand euros from next year.