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 did something the industry rarely does in public. We took our own regulatory tracker, where every entry is verified by hand against official government sources, and matched it against open market data from Inside Airbnb.

This first report covers four markets where both halves of the picture are available: London, New Orleans, Edinburgh and Honolulu. The supply figures are September 2025 snapshots. 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 headline is that 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 by far the largest market and shows zero licence identifiers, because no national registration scheme is in force. Its binding constraint is a 90-night annual cap, not a licence.
• New Orleans and Honolulu, both with mandatory permit systems, show 78.5% and 72.8% of listings carrying a registration identifier.
• Edinburgh requires a licence by law, where operating without one is a criminal offence, yet only 23.9% of its listings display an identifier.
• Honolulu is the most concentrated market by a wide margin: the median host runs 13 listings, and 81% of listings belong to multi-listing hosts.

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)	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
Honolulu	Yes (registration)	STRs limited to resort and designated zones; the number must appear in every advert

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

The supply numbers

Metric (September 2025)	London	New Orleans	Edinburgh	Honolulu
Total listings	96,871	7,444	4,936	9,367
Active (review in last 12 months)	48,261	4,939	4,407	6,465
Whole home, of active	70.4%	88.8%	72.7%	91.9%
Median availability, active (nights/yr)	174	257	144	249
Available 180-plus nights, active	48.7%	66.0%	42.6%	70.1%
From multi-listing hosts	53.7%	65.1%	51.2%	81.4%
Median listings per host	2	3	2	13
Shows a licence identifier	0.0%	78.5%	23.9%	72.8%
Licence field blank	100%	17.9%	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 tightest regimes in the United States, and still carries 9,367 listings, of which 6,465 are active. That is more active inventory than New Orleans or Edinburgh, both of which are less geographically restricted.

London sits at the other extreme. The only real 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. London is about three times the size of the other three markets combined, with 48,261 active listings against their combined 15,811, and roughly an order of magnitude larger than any single one of them.

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. Blank fields and the literal value Exempt do not count.

xychart-beta
  title "Share of listings showing a licence identifier (September 2025)"
  x-axis ["London", "Edinburgh", "Honolulu", "New Orleans"]
  y-axis "Percent of listings" 0 --> 100
  bar [0, 23.9, 72.8, 78.5]

London sits at zero, and that is expected: there is no national register to enrol in, so there is nothing to display. A registration scheme is enabled by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, but no regulations had brought it into operation as of 2025. New Orleans at 78.5% 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 simply 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 far weaker than in the two US markets, where the same kind of obligation coincides with three-quarters of listings carrying a number.

Finding 3: concentration varies more than the rules do

xychart-beta
  title "Share of listings from multi-listing hosts (September 2025)"
  x-axis ["Edinburgh", "London", "New Orleans", "Honolulu"]
  y-axis "Percent of listings" 0 --> 100
  bar [51.2, 53.7, 65.1, 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, squeezing out the occasional single-property host rather than the professional one.

London and Edinburgh look more like a long tail: a median host of two listings, and just over half of inventory from multi-listing hosts. New Orleans sits between, tilted toward professional operators at 65.1%.

Finding 4: how dedicated is the offer

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

New Orleans and Honolulu score highest on both. Close to nine in ten active listings are whole homes, and the median listing is bookable for around 250 nights a year (257 in New Orleans, 249 in Honolulu). That is the profile of dedicated, professionally run inventory.

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

What this means if you operate here

• London: plan around the 90-night cap and planning permission, not a licence. Watch the national registration scheme, which exists in law but is not yet operational; when it switches on, the zero in this report will move fast.
• Edinburgh: the low display rate is not a green light. The licence is mandatory and criminally enforced. Make sure yours is in order and visible on the listing, because the gap between the legal duty and the observed display rate is exactly the kind of thing an enforcement drive targets.
• New Orleans and Honolulu: permit culture is mature and visible, so expect scrutiny and budget for it. In Honolulu specifically, you are competing against large, multi-listing operators concentrated in a small set of zones.

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.
• These are single snapshots from September 2025. Seasonality and enforcement timing matter; a control-area deadline or a registration drive can move these numbers within a quarter.
• The Honolulu figures are the Honolulu-county slice of the Hawaii state file, isolated by neighbourhood group.

Reproducibility

Every figure here is reproducible. The aggregation logic and the exact source files are listed below, and the script that produced the numbers is part of our open tooling. Re-run it against the same Inside Airbnb files and you will land on the same table. We will refresh this report when the next quarterly snapshots land, and the licence-display gap in Edinburgh is the first number we will be watching.