Using the internet to find good holiday accommodation requires a keen eye for the tricks of photography.
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Navigating Airbnb listings is no exception.
Search for an apartment in Nelson Bay and your screen is flooded with shots of impossibly white sand, ice blue water and, almost certainly, a bottle of wine on a veranda just metres, seemingly, from the water.
For Dungog, the photos show soft afternoon light across paddocks as green as Ireland's, full dams hosting a flotilla of ducks and, yes, a bottle of wine perched on a heirloom astride a comfy couch surveying the countryside for miles around. And for Pokolbin the Airbnb screen fills with quaint cottages draped with lavender and roses, bedrooms like a Laura Ashley showroom and, yes, a bottle wine with a cheese board in the foreground of a rolling vineyard with a mob of 'roos in the distance.
But Airbnb tells us that visitors to the Hunter don't feel deceived. Airbnb guests to Newcastle have filed over 12,000 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars. Lake Macquarie has over 7000 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars, and Cessnock-Pokolbin has over 6000 reviews with an average 4.9 stars.
It looks like the Airbnb caper is a successful one. Just 10 years ago Airbnb was a start-up company in America with a $1 million loan. Today the company is valued at over $50 billion. This year the company expects to receive more than $10 billion in revenue worldwide.
Airbnb has a simple business model. A property owner offers short-term accommodation on the Airbnb website, a traveller makes a booking, and Airbnb gets a cut of the guest's payment, somewhere between 6 per cent and 12 per cent depending on the size of the bill.
The key to Airbnb's success is the keenness of property owners to offer for rent their idle bedrooms, apartments, houses, farms, even castles, private islands and houseboats.
For the lower Hunter - always popular as a getaway destination for cashed-up Sydneysiders - Airbnb listings have grown spectacularly, especially in beachside locations and the region's wine tourism districts.
Four years ago I wondered in this column if the rise of Airbnb was a good thing: Would party houses upset local residents? Who would protect the largely invisible labour force charged with cleaning and refreshing rooms for the next guests? Would existing hoteliers lose out to unregulated providers who could turn a blind eye to tax, wages and safety obligations?
Certainly, these questions remain. Last week, a reader's comment on the Herald website expressed concern over the rising presence of Airbnb properties around Newcastle's beaches; meaning, claimed the reader, fewer homes occupied by local families, exacerbated parking shortages, unfamiliar faces in neighbouring backyards, persistent late night noise, and money-hungry owners skimping on community obligations.
Yet, if spectacular growth in listings in the lower Hunter is a guide, Airbnb has become an entrenched and popular component of the Hunter's visitor economy.
As a bonus, Airbnb has become a significant vehicle for the upgrade of the Hunter's ageing townships away from the coast. A renovated miner's cottage in Cessnock becomes quaint lodgings for a weekend of wine tasting. A large group of young Sydney professionals prepared to pay big bucks gives a second life to an estate cottage and its pocket vineyard, a relic of a zealous investor from the heady days of the 1980s. In concert, a local couple can mobilise untapped entrepreneurial skills and turn modest savings into a reasonable investment, without sending their money out of the district.
Airbnb has become a significant vehicle for the upgrade of the Hunter's ageing townships away from the coast.
What's not to like? Of course, councils need to take a stronger hand when Airbnb property owners disregard the rights of permanent residents. And there is a case for urban zonings that restrict concentrations of short-term lets targeted at holidayers and party goers. Residential neighbourhoods are places where people are entitled to stable, safe, friendly community environments.
However, away from the 'burbs, Airbnb generates a variety of welcome accommodation options, certainly richer than the traditional offerings of hotel chains. That locals are tapping entrepreneurial talents and banking handy extra income is more than icing on a cake. Their ventures could well be a guide to what sustainable economic development looks like.
