Airbnb by-laws – holiday gifts to your schemes

With the weather being unpredictable these days, there are other sure signs that summer is on the way; Christmas music is flooding our shops, decorations are popping up everywhere and Airbnb is ramping up their TV advertising.

Yes, it’s not just Santa who’s on his way. With Christmas and New Year just around the corner and borders open post-covid, Airbnb-style short-term holiday rentals are starting to seriously crank up for business.

And, as the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) has already warned, more schoolies could be using holiday let apartments closer to home this year.

For most apartment owners across Australia, this is something our state governments are happy to leave us to deal with – they will take those tourist dollars at any cost, especially ours, not theirs.

The big difference in all this is apartments in Greater Sydney where we are allowed to have by-laws restricting or banning the use of units for short-term lets by non-resident owners.

To be clear, Sydney strata schemes can’t prevent anyone from using their principal place of residence for short term lets for up to 180 nights a year.

But you can keep investor apartments out of the Airbnb market and you can also exercise some controls over those holiday lets that are allowed.

What are those controls and how do you exercise them? The obvious answer is through your by-laws which can legitimately insist, for instance, that holiday let “hosts” abide by the NSW Short Term Holiday Letting (STHL) Code of Conduct and that they inform the owners corporation when they will have holiday guests in their apartments.

But by-laws can be legal and logistical minefields if you don’t word them correctly. The last thing you need is for STHL hosts to be running unwanted holiday lets while they pick holes in your badly written by-laws.

That’s one reason two of our sponsors – Strata Choice and Bannermans Lawyers – have got together to provide a watertight by-law that you can adopt for your strata scheme.

Strata Choice client schemes are offered the by-law at no cost from the strata managers’ website.  Everyone else can purchase the by-law off-the-peg from Bannermans on theirs. Just click on the links above.

And even if you’re not in Greater Sydney, these by-laws can help remind STHL hosts that they have responsibilities, such as providing guests with safety information and alerting them to the rules in your block about behaviour and use of common property.  

Check them out.  They could make sure your scheme’s Christmas is as merry as you wish.