There were also concerns that when passed on to consumers, it could cause a downturn in regional tourism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Data from AirDNA, an organisation that provides analytics on the short-term rental industry, showed after several years of increasing listings in Victoria, growth slowed significantly in the first year of the new tax.<\/p>\n
According to the data, there was a steady growth of listings year-on-year between January 2022 and January 2025.<\/p>\n
In January 2023, there were about 37,097 available listings up from 31,410 the previous year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That number jumped again in 2024 by nearly 22 per cent to 45,178.<\/p>\n
In 2025, when the levy came into effect, there was a significantly smaller increase of 2.6 per cent (46,342).<\/p>\n
And in January 2026, a year after the tax had been in place, available listings saw a decline of about 0.5 per cent on the previous year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stakeholders said it was difficult to attribute the decline to the tax alone, with interest rate rises and other factors likely to have had an impact on owners pulling out of the market.<\/p>\n
“There’s probably a few different factors at play,” managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham said.<\/p>\n
“One of them is the price of housing these days and the cost of living, generally meaning that people are more cautious with their investments.”<\/p>\n
After a boom of properties moving into the short-stay sector post COVID-19 lockdowns, he said part of the stabilisation could have been in the context of that “frenzy of activity”.<\/p>\n
“It effectively hasn’t changed much in the last 15 months. That’s a reasonable outcome, having had spurts of growth post-pandemic,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eacham Curry, the senior director of government and corporate affairs at Stayz, said his company’s short-term rental supply had remained “stable” across Victoria since the levy’s introduction.<\/p>\n
“Stayz has always advocated for the STRA (short term rental accommodation) sector to make a fair contribution that recognises the impact that it has on the provision of services by State and Local Governments,” he said.<\/p>\n
“However, any levy should be set at a reasonable level, administered by the State, and applied uniformly to all short-term accommodation providers.<\/p>\n
“Arbitrary taxes or levies risk damaging the economic value the STRA sector brings to local communities.”<\/p>\n
The organisation has previously said the introduction of the tax was “unlikely to achieve the State Government’s desired outcome to address housing concerns”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Airbnb declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Market decline and costs passed on to guests<\/p>\n
One real estate agent in Apollo Bay said the tax had been “damaging” to holiday destinations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Director of Good Life Real Estate in Apollo Bay, Trish Goodlet, said she had noticed an increase in homes used for short-stay accommodation being put on the market for sale since the levy was introduced.<\/p>\n
“We’ve definitely got a lot of listings that were profitable successful [short-stay] investments for people and then with the levies some have listed those for sale because they’re not performing as well as they hoped,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s just getting tougher and tougher for those people that have had had holiday homes in their families for years and the various levies and taxes are really taking effect.”<\/p>\n
Ms Goodlet said in the past about 80 per cent of her buyers would be holiday home investors but that has since shifted to retirees or families looking to move.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s definitely been a rollercoaster ride of various impacting factors on our property market,” Ms Goodlet said.<\/p>\n
By contrast, investment property owner Benny Harrap said the levy had had no impact on his business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/7e85e353838617b07a74e8fbd7655ed3.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Benny Harrap owns two holiday rentals in Wodonga.\u00a0 (Supplied: Ben Harrap)<\/p>\n
He owns a number of investment properties, two of which are advertised as short-stay accommodation in Wodonga, along the Victoria-New South Wales border.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think it’s worthwhile,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I find [short-stay accommodation] is higher risk, potentially higher reward if you’re in the right area and have the right property to do so.”<\/p>\n
He said the new tax was often pushed onto holiday makers through the booking site.<\/p>\n
“The way it works within the platforms is they charge on top of all the fees,” he said.<\/p>\n
“So I charge a fee, there might be a cleaning fee on the platform and then the platform charges a fee and they’ll put an additional 7.5 per cent on top of that, which gets charged to the customer.”<\/p>\n
While he said he had not noticed a drop in his own clients he said the price increase could deter some guests, which might force property owners to drop the price of their listing to compensate for the decrease in bookings.<\/p>\n
“It didn’t affect us as much, but it could have. There’s been so many factors over the past year and a half,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve now got return customers and that sort of snowball effect of people have stayed here before, more reviews, more people wanting to stay.”<\/p>\n
He said the cost of petrol was his current concern, which has been the reason for recent cancellations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a year after the Victorian government’s short-stay levy was introduced, data shows the growth of listings…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[40680,64,63,99,296211,107119,70922,296210,4961],"class_list":{"0":"post-609321","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-airbnb","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-government-levy","13":"tag-holiday-rentals","14":"tag-short-stay","15":"tag-short-stays-levy","16":"tag-tax"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}