Homes, hotels or both? Christchurch’s Airbnb dilemma

Christchurch has spent years rebuilding its central city and encouraging people to call it home. New apartments and townhouses have sprung up, cafés and restaurants have returned, and the magnificent new One New Zealand Stadium at Te Kaha set to bring thousands more people into the heart of the city.

Yet walk through some of those new residential streets and locals say something is missing… the people.

Christchurch has a curious problem

While the homes are going up, the number of people actually living there doesn’t appear to be keeping pace.

Christchurch documentary makers Frank Film recently highlighted the issue in Are we building a ghost town in Christchurch?, also published by the Otago Daily Times.

Standing among the new apartments, Christchurch City Councillor Nathaniel Herz-Jardine pointed to quiet streets, empty green spaces and few of the everyday signs you might expect in a residential neighbourhood.

“There’s no washing out. Where are the kids? Where are the families?” he asked.

Herz-Jardine says 484 new dwellings were built in the inner city in the past year, while the population increased by just 50 people.

While Christchurch has spent years trying to bring permanent residents back into its rebuilt centre, short-term visitor accommodation has also become an increasingly visible part of the inner-city landscape.

And for the accommodation industry, there’s another question sitting behind all of this: at what point does a home being rented to visitors become an accommodation business?

The numbers tell an interesting story

Back in 2018, Christchurch City Council set an ambitious goal of 20,000 people living in the Central City by 2028.

Christchurch has made progress. Council’s latest detailed Central City Annual Update puts the population at 9,160 in June 2024, more than 800 above its pre-earthquake population, with consistent population growth of around four to six percent annually since 2020.

So despite the rather dramatic “ghost town” description, people are moving back. Just nowhere near the 20,000 originally envisaged.

And Christchurch certainly hasn’t stopped building.

Council reported 260 homes were completed in the Central City in the year to June 2025 and another 407 were under construction. There is growth, both in housing and residents. What has caught people’s attention is the apparent gap between the two.

Short-term accommodation has inevitably become part of that conversation.

How many homes are actually homes?

Hundreds of apartment holiday rentals are currently advertised on Airbnb in Christchurch Central City. But those numbers need to be treated carefully.

An Airbnb listing doesn’t automatically represent a home removed from Christchurch’s residential market. Some will be people’s own homes offered occasionally, others may be investment properties, and some may have been bought specifically as visitor accommodation.

There isn’t enough evidence to say Airbnb is responsible for Christchurch falling short of its 20,000-resident ambition.

Herz-Jardine, however, believes short stays are affecting the kind of neighbourhood being created. He told Frank Film that some new apartments have been built and marketed with short stays in mind and pointed to the nightly rates accommodation can command during major events.

“The surge pricing on Airbnb and other websites is so extreme that as long as you hit those big nights — Robbie Williams, Six60 and the Crusaders — you can just leave it empty the rest of the time,” he said.

Frank Film also spoke to permanent residents. One, Bernard, said he had wanted to live in a community with permanent neighbours. Another, Dale, described repeatedly thinking someone new had moved in, only to discover they were short-term visitors.

“You sort of give up talking to people,” he said, because the apparent new neighbour may only be there for “24 hours or 48 hours”.

Christchurch has been here before

Christchurch has actually been wrestling with short-term accommodation for the best part of a decade.

Council supported research into Airbnb’s impact as far back as 2018 and eventually introduced new planning rules through Plan Change 4. Airbnb appealed, mediation followed and the Environment Court released its decision on the final rules in July 2023.

In most residential zones outside the 50dB airport noise contour, an unhosted home can be used for visitor accommodation without resource consent for up to 60 nights in a 12-month period, with a maximum of eight guests and other conditions.

Things can be considerably more permissive elsewhere. In most commercial zones there are no limits on guest numbers or nights, while Council says there are no specific requirements for permitted home-based visitor accommodation in Mixed Use zones, including the Central City and South Frame.

So even the rules change depending on which part of central Christchurch you’re standing in.

Read more Christchurch news HERE

Then there’s the rates question

For established accommodation operators, this is where things become particularly interesting.

During consultation on its 2026/27 Annual Plan, Christchurch City Council acknowledged its existing policy was difficult to apply because it was hard to determine how long individual properties were being used for short-term accommodation.

Council said this meant it was “not charging short-term accommodation providers the business rate differential”. As a result, it said those ratepayers weren’t paying their “fair share”, leaving other ratepayers to “pick up the slack”.

Herz-Jardine is now calling for a mandatory national registration system for short-term accommodation and for booking platforms to share information with councils about the properties operating on their sites. He argues this would give councils a clearer picture of which properties are being used for short-term accommodation and make it easier to enforce existing planning and rating rules.

Christchurch accommodation operators have also been making their position clear.

In May, Chris Lynch Media reported that a group of motel, hospitality and resident representatives had spoken to Christchurch City Council’s Policy and Planning Committee calling for mandatory national registration of short-term accommodation providers.

Among them was Carnmore Hagley Park operator Richard Garling, who said the industry wasn’t opposed to competition.

“We obviously expect healthy competition and innovation in the market,” he said. “We just feel that it should be on a fair playing field.”

And that gets closer to the real issue than simply pitching hotels against Airbnb.

There is an important distinction here. Someone renting a spare bedroom or putting their family home on Airbnb for a few weeks is hardly the same as an investor operating residential properties as visitor accommodation year-round.

When Christchurch City Council agreed to tighter short-term accommodation rules in 2022, Airbnb pushed back. In a statement reported by RNZ, Airbnb’s then Australia and New Zealand manager Susan Wheeldon described the rules as the “most restrictive in all of Australasia” and said they would prevent people from earning extra income to help offset rising living costs.

Visitors or neighbours?

Short-term accommodation has an important role to play in Christchurch’s visitor economy.

Families and groups often want the space and facilities it provides, while short-term rentals can add valuable capacity when major events come to town. With the new stadium set to bring sporting events and concerts into the heart of Christchurch, those visitors will also spend money in restaurants, bars, shops and cafés.

Tourists certainly aren’t the enemy of a vibrant city.

But permanent residents are there on Tuesday morning too. They buy groceries, grab a takeaway, walk the dog, become regulars at the café downstairs and, hopefully, get to know the person next door.

Interestingly, Herz-Jardine doesn’t blame developers.

“They’re just doing what the market tells them,” he told Frank Film.

And Council itself appears to recognise that building residential properties isn’t necessarily the same thing as attracting residents. A proposed development contributions rebate designed to encourage higher-density housing and more permanent Central City residents specifically excluded short-term guest accommodation.

Read more NZ news HERE

So, is Airbnb creating a ‘ghost town’?

We simply don’t know.

There isn’t enough reliable public data to say how many Central City properties are predominantly operating as short-term accommodation, how many are occasional home shares, how many would otherwise be available to long-term tenants or owner-occupiers, or how much impact short-term rentals are actually having on Christchurch’s permanent population.

Those are pretty important questions. They matter to residents worried about whether their new neighbourhood will ever feel like one. They matter to Council, which has spent years trying to bring people back into the heart of Christchurch. And they certainly matter to hotels, motels and other accommodation businesses wondering whether everyone competing for the same visitor dollar is playing by comparable rules.

Airbnb has changed the way we travel, and short-term accommodation isn’t going away. Nor should every Airbnb be treated as though it is a hotel. But somewhere between renting your spare room for the occasional weekend and operating residential properties predominantly as visitor accommodation, the distinction becomes considerably less clear.

Exactly where that line should sit is something Christchurch is still trying to work out.

Frank Film asked whether Christchurch is building a ghost town. The evidence doesn’t support going that far, particularly when Council’s own figures show the Central City population is growing. But it does raise a question worth asking as the city continues its remarkable rebuild.

Christchurch has built the apartments. Now, who are they for?

Read the latest edition of AccomNews HERE