Regulation vs Supply: A Four-Market Short-Term Rental Snapshot

Most short-term rental commentary treats regulation and supply as one story: tighten the rules, shrink the market. We wanted to test that against numbers we could stand behind, so we matched our own regulatory tracker, where every entry is verified by hand against official government sources, against open market data from Inside Airbnb.

This report covers four markets where both halves of the picture are available: London, New Orleans, Edinburgh and Honolulu. New Orleans is updated to the March 2026 Inside Airbnb snapshot (2026-03-19), the most recent available at the time of this refresh. London, Edinburgh and Honolulu retain the September 2025 snapshots, as Inside Airbnb had not published newer snapshots for those markets at the time of this update. The regulatory facts come from our verified tracker. Sydney, our fifth verified market, is absent here because Inside Airbnb does not publish a Sydney dataset.

The pattern is consistent across snapshots: the rules do not predict the market. Stricter regimes do not reliably produce smaller markets, and a legal duty to hold a licence does not reliably produce listings that show one.

Key findings

• London is the largest market and shows zero licence identifiers, because no national registration scheme was in force per our tracker; its binding constraint is a 90-night annual cap, not a licence.
• New Orleans, with a mandatory permit system, shows 81.4% of listings carrying a registration identifier in the March 2026 snapshot.
• Edinburgh requires a licence by law (operating without one is a criminal offence), yet only 23.9% of its September 2025 listings display an identifier.
• Honolulu is the most concentrated market in this set: the median host runs 13 listings, and 81.4% of listings belong to multi-listing hosts.
• Edinburgh’s Visitor Levy takes effect on 24 July 2026, adding a 5% charge on accommodation cost for the first 5 consecutive nights of each stay.

The four regimes, one line each

Market	Licence or registration required	Headline rule
London	No (a national scheme is enabled in law but not yet operational per our tracker)	90-night annual cap for whole-home letting without planning permission
New Orleans	Yes (annual, two licence classes)	Residential and commercial classes; commercial needs zoning approval
Edinburgh	Yes (mandatory licence)	Operating unlicensed is a criminal offence, fine up to GBP 2,500; Visitor Levy (5%) effective 24 July 2026
Honolulu	Yes (registration)	STRs limited to resort and designated zones; registration number must appear in every listing

Full detail, including official sources and tax treatment, is on each tracker page: London, New Orleans, Edinburgh and Honolulu.

The supply numbers

Metric (2026-03)	London	New Orleans	Edinburgh	Honolulu
Total listings	96,871	6,218	4,936	9,367
Active (review in last 12 months)	48,261	4,540	4,407	6,465
Whole home, of active	70.4%	84.9%	72.7%	91.9%
Median availability, active (nights/yr)	174	269	144	249
Available 180-plus nights, active	48.7%	69.8%	42.6%	70.1%
From multi-listing hosts	53.7%	65.6%	51.2%	81.4%
Median listings per host	2	3	2	13
Shows a licence identifier	0.0%	81.4%	23.9%	72.8%
Licence field blank	100.0%	15.9%	75.3%	12.7%

Finding 1: market size does not track regulatory strictness

Honolulu restricts short-term rentals to resort and a handful of designated zones, one of the tighter regimes in the United States, and still carries 9,367 total listings, of which 6,465 are active. That is more active inventory than New Orleans (4,540 active) or Edinburgh (4,407 active), both of which are less geographically restricted.

London sits at the other extreme. The only binding constraint on a primary-residence host there is a 90-night annual cap set by the Deregulation Act 2015; there is no licence to obtain per our tracker. London’s 48,261 active listings is more than any of the other three markets individually, and it carries 96,871 total listings across the scrape.

If regulatory strictness drove market size, the ranking would run the other way. It does not.

Finding 2: a legal duty to register does not guarantee a visible licence

The licence field in Inside Airbnb records whatever a host enters on the platform. We counted a listing as showing an identifier when that field contains a registration number with digits. Blank fields and the literal value Exempt do not count.

xychart-beta
  title "Share of listings showing a licence identifier (2026-03)"
  x-axis ["London", "Edinburgh", "Honolulu", "New Orleans"]
  y-axis "Percent of listings" 0 --> 100
  bar [0, 23.9, 72.8, 81.4]

London sits at zero, and that is expected: there is no national register to enrol in per our tracker, so there is nothing to display. New Orleans at 81.4% (March 2026 snapshot) and Honolulu at 72.8% both run mature permit systems, and Honolulu has an explicit rule that the registration number must appear in every advertisement.

Edinburgh is the outlier. Scotland’s short-term let licensing scheme is mandatory, and operating without a licence is a criminal offence carrying a fine of up to GBP 2,500. Yet only 23.9% of Edinburgh listings display an identifier. We cannot tell from this data alone whether that reflects genuine non-compliance, hosts leaving the field blank, or licences that exist but are not surfaced on the listing. What the data does show is that the visible-compliance signal is far weaker than the legal duty would suggest, and weaker than in the two US markets, where a similar obligation coincides with 72.8% (Honolulu) or 81.4% (New Orleans) of listings carrying a number.

Finding 3: concentration varies more than the rules do

xychart-beta
  title "Share of listings from multi-listing hosts (2026-03)"
  x-axis ["Edinburgh", "London", "New Orleans", "Honolulu"]
  y-axis "Percent of listings" 0 --> 100
  bar [51.2, 53.7, 65.6, 81.4]

Honolulu is in a category of its own. The median host runs 13 listings, and 81.4% of all listings belong to hosts with more than one. The resort-zone restriction may paradoxically favour larger, capitalised operators who can navigate zoning and registration, reducing the footprint of occasional single-property hosts more than that of professional ones.

London and Edinburgh look more like a long tail: a median of 2 listings per host, and around half of inventory from multi-listing hosts (53.7% and 51.2% respectively). New Orleans sits between, tilted toward professional operators at 65.6%.

Finding 4: how dedicated is the offer

Two figures act as rough proxies for how committed a listing is to short-term renting rather than occasional home-sharing: the whole-home share, and median availability over the coming year.

New Orleans and Honolulu score highest on both. A large majority of active listings are whole homes (84.9% in New Orleans, 91.9% in Honolulu), and the median listing is available for most of the year (269 nights in New Orleans, 249 in Honolulu). That is the profile of dedicated, professionally run inventory.

Edinburgh has the lowest median availability at 144 nights, and a whole-home share of 72.7%. That is consistent with a market that still includes a meaningful share of live-in hosts, which aligns with a licensing scheme whose categories explicitly separate home sharing from secondary letting.

What this means if you operate here

• London: plan around the 90-night cap and planning permission, not a licence. Our tracker notes that a national registration scheme is enabled in law but not yet operational; when it activates, the zero identifier figure in this report will shift quickly.
• Edinburgh: the low display rate is not a green light. The licence is mandatory and criminally enforced. Make sure yours is visible on the listing. Note also that the Visitor Levy takes effect on 24 July 2026, adding a 5% charge on the first 5 consecutive nights of each stay - budget and price accordingly.
• New Orleans: permit culture is mature and visible, with 81.4% of listings displaying an identifier in the March 2026 snapshot. Expect compliance scrutiny.
• Honolulu: zone-restricted market dominated by multi-listing hosts. The median host holds 13 listings, which shapes the competitive environment. The permit number must appear in every listing, and that obligation is enforced in a market where most operators are already complying.

Limits of this data

We would rather you trust this report because we are clear about what it cannot show.

• Inside Airbnb is an independent scrape of public listing pages, not an official register. It is a strong proxy, not ground truth.
• Active counts listings with at least one review in the past 12 months. Brand-new listings and those whose guests do not review are undercounted.
• The licence field is self-reported and inconsistently populated from city to city. Treat the identifier share as a floor on visible compliance, not a measure of legality.
• This report uses a mixed-date snapshot: New Orleans data is from March 2026; London, Edinburgh and Honolulu data is from September 2025. Cross-market comparisons should account for the different periods, and seasonality can move these numbers within a quarter.
• The Honolulu figures are the Honolulu-county slice of the Hawaii state file, isolated by neighbourhood group.
• Edinburgh’s Visitor Levy (effective 24 July 2026) is not yet reflected in the market data shown here.

Reproducibility

Every figure here is reproducible. The aggregation logic and the exact source files are listed in the data sources above, and the script that produced the numbers is at infra/reports/aggregate_supply.py. Re-run it against the same Inside Airbnb files and you will land on the same table. We will refresh this report when newer Inside Airbnb snapshots land for London, Edinburgh and Honolulu.