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Is Airbnb making your rent go up?

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Some industry experts and housing advocates say the growth of Airbnb has pushed the price of rent and housing higher, but how much or how little can be difficult to prove.

The level of difficulty of finding an apartment hasn’t changed much since the advent of the popular short-term rental platform. When the website launched in 2008, the apartment vacancy rate was 2.24 percent with 116,127 units in San Diego County. In March, it was 2.46 percent with 130,976 units, according to data from MarketPointe Realty Advisors. The historic average since 1988 is 3.51 percent.

While rents have gone up steadily in the past few years, the proportion of entire homes occupied much of the year by short-term renters still represents a fraction of the region’s housing inventory. Among Airbnb bookings, roughly 620 countywide were rented earlier this year for more than 140 days, a point at which a dwelling can typically command more revenue as a short-term rental than a long-term one.

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For context, there were more than 1 million occupied housing units in San Diego County in 2014, according to the U.S. Census. It’s tough to gauge, though, how a home or apartment would be used if it were not listed with Airbnb.

“With the advent of Airbnb, there are probably a number of those units that would potentially be in the rental pool,” said Russ Valone, president of MarketPointe. “(But) I don’t know how you determine what that Airbnb’s use would be if was not for Airbnb.”

RELATED: Airbnb: Opportunity or nuisance? Home sharing operators rack up income but some worry about effect on neighborhoods, housing market

Pressure on the rental market is largely due to a lack of supply in the housing market, said Mark Goldman, a finance and real estate lecturer at San Diego State University.

“There are more families, more households than there are housing units,” he said.

A study released in April by the University of Southern California’s real estate school said San Diego County rent is expected to rise faster than the rest of Southern California because of a lack of construction, as well as anticipated employment and population growth.

The USC study, prepared by Beacon Economics, noted that last year there were 6,273 construction permits issued for multifamily home construction in San Diego. That was 2,308 less than Orange County and 11,596 less than Los Angeles County.

Goldman believes demand for vacation rentals will raise home prices, especially in beach areas, and boost rents.

“If you own property, you take the risk to buy it and maintain it and so forth,” he said. “When do you get to try for the most income you can get versus serving the common good?”

Molly Kirkland of the San Diego Apartment Association, which represents landlords and property management companies, said the organization has worked with landlords to strengthen lease agreements so renters cannot rent out rooms for short-term rentals.

She said, as far as the association knows, most of its members are still in the business of traditional, long-term rentals.

“We don’t see it cutting into the rental market,” she said of the short-term rental business. “What is really impacting the rental and the for-sale market is just the overall lack of supply and lack of construction of units.”

How Airbnb affects the home buying market is up for debate, although some real estate agents say not having a short-term rental option can make selling a home harder.

Zig Hamner, an agent who sells homes in Pacific Beach, said he recently struggled to sell a high-end $1.3 million condo on the beach — usually not that hard — because the homeowner association prevented rentals from being shorter than six months.

“They don’t want a bunch of college kids partying,” Hamner said of HOA fears.

Gary Kent, a real estate agent who sells in La Jolla and Pacific Beach, said he has yet to have a buyer be concerned about living next to a house that uses Airbnb, but that doesn’t mean it would be an easy sell.

“I’ve yet to have a homebuyer say, ‘I want to find a house next to a vacation rental,’” he said.

San Diego County housing is already failing to keep pace with demand and has a near impossible challenge to turn things around, said a recent study from online contractor database BuildZoom.

The report showed San Diego’s rate of outward building expansion decreased 50 percent since 1970, making it the seventh-slowest expanding metropolitan area in the United States.

Despite the difficulty in predicting Airbnb’s effect on housing, some groups have taken educated guesses.

A labor-backed advocacy group in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, estimated in March 2015 that more than 7,000 houses and apartments have been taken off the rental market in metro Los Angeles for use as short-term rentals.

phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com