It’s been a funny old week in StrataLand. The whole short-stay letting issue is headed for a major showdown with both apartment owners and Airbnb bringing out the heavy artillery in preparation for a battle for the soul of strata living.
Just to bring you up to speed (in case you have managed to avoid this saga so far) short-term holiday letting agencies and their supporters this year convinced a NSW parliamentary committee that apartments should be treated exactly the same way as houses when it comes to holiday lets.
The committee’s report also suggested that whole-home lets should be allowed with a limit of, say 100 nights a year (or every weekend, as some people have pointed out).
In the special (but not very) case of apartments, if there were problems then the owners could run around chasing the miscreants, at their own expense and additional stress, just like they proposed in Victoria. Note the past tense of ‘proposed’ – more on that later.
OK, that’s the story so far. Last week Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s head of global policy told a highly select group of journalists at a media briefing in Sydney that he and his family love Sydney and 80 per cent of Sydneysiders love Airbnb. Whoo-hoo! Everybody is happy.
And yet, despite that, at almost exactly the same time a group of about 60 chairpersons of apartment blocks in Sydney met and agreed to commit up to $300,000 to a fighting fund to reverse the unrelenting and largely unchallenged positive spin driven by the short-stay letting industry.
The owners want to maintain the status quo. They are not anti-short-stay lets, they just want the vast majority of owners in each apartment building to be able to choose whether or not holiday lets are allowed there and under what circumstances.
If you want to join the fight to retain the right to decide
whether or not you want short-stay letting in your
scheme go to the Owners Corporation Network website.
Does that seem like they are asking to have far too much power over their neighbours?
Consider this. Under the freshly minted NSW strata laws, 75 percent of owners can force the other 25 percent to sell their homes. That’s right – if nine owners in a block of 12 want to sell the whole building to developers, the other three should start house-hunting ASAP.
Yet, under proposed legislation, 99 percent of owners would not be able to prevent one selfish [insert your preferred obscene epithet here] from letting their apartment to a conga line of yahoos, footy fans, buck’s parties, schoolies and members of the Barmy Army.
CRITICAL
I have had to rely on my esteemed colleagues in the media to tell me what was said at the Lehane briefing because I wasn’t invited. This may seem odd to you, given I have written more about Airbnb than anyone else, probably more than all the others put together.
I know this because last week I received a call from a senior spin doctor in the Airbnb organisation, and he claimed that in the past year or so I had written 22 articles about Airbnb – all of them negative. There is an element of truth in his claim but, as with most of airbnb’s pronouncements, a highly selective use of facts.
All of the articles may have criticized Airbnb to some extents, but they weren’t entirely negative. I think Airbnb in its original form was a brilliant idea. I have used it in the past and I will probably use it again (unless I am blacklisted). My wife and many of our friends use it, most as guests but some as hosts.
And here’s another conundrum for you, some of the people at the meeting that committed funds to fight for the right to decide whether or not we want short-stay letting in our apartment buildings, also like Airbnb, have used it and will use it again.
But it’s not a case of Nimbys saying “not in my back yard”; apartment owners are saying ‘not at my front door, in my lift lobby, swimming pool or car park … unless I get to choose when and how often.’
LOVED
If only Airbnb had stuck with their original idea of people sharing their homes, I would be 20 stories down on my productivity for this year and they wouldn’t have needed to send one of their heavy-hitting executives to Sydney to convince journalists and politicians that they are loved wherever they go (despite having been banned in Berlin, bailed up in Barcelona, no-way-jose’d in New York, and hampered in Amsterdam).
I’m sorry, but I refuse to drink the “sharing economy” kool-aid … well, at least, not all of it. The idea of renting a spare room in your home to a like-minded traveler is romantic and pragmatic at the same time. You meet new friends and make a few bucks. What’s not to love about that?
But when it threatens to rip the heart out of the rental market in our cities and destroy our fledgling strata communities by allowing selfish property investors to let multiple properties to short-stay guests whom they never even see, that’s too bitter a pill to swallow.
But that’s not an aspect of the industry that you will ever hear about from the pro-short-stay lobby. The feel-good factor is way up there in their playbook. They make us all feel good about sharing our homes and our local knowledge with visitors.
And they make politicians feel good about ordinary people earning some extra cash at no cost to anyone else, especially when these “ordinary people” are apparently paying off student loans and financing life-saving operations for their Moms and saving up for a house so they can have babies.
What kind of politician wouldn’t be drawn to that warm glow, like a moths to a flame? And what kind of monster would get all picky about the details? That would be me.
So what is my problem?
I write about apartment living and have done for the past 12 or more years. I have watched attitudes to living in flats evolve from them being seen as a poor alternative to living in a house, to a valid lifestyle choice.
Given that half the people living in apartments are renters, I have also promoted the idea that long-term renting is not a sign that you have failed as a human being. And given that in about 10 years half the population of Sydney will be living in strata, this is a message that needs to get out there.
Even so, there is still a body of opinion that owning a crappy house in a rotten area is better than renting a stylish apartment in a salubrious part of town. And if you are crazy enough to choose to live in an apartment, you get what you deserve.
OK housies, you’re living your dream. So go ahead, rent out your room or your whole house if you want. You’re not bothering anyone but yourself, the taxman and the proprietors of the legitimate B&B on the corner who have to comply with all sorts of legislation that you don’t.
But it’s with apartments where my admiration for and appreciation of the airbnb concept hits a brick wall. Because renting apartments to strangers for holiday lets when you are not there does affect other people and potentially undermines a couple of decades of community building too.
MESSAGE
One of the things that the Airbnb flack said to me last week was that there are two sides to every story. Well, not to the Airbnb story, there isn’t (at least, if you go by the output from their slick message machine).
Ask them about the number of whole homes being let in the popular holiday areas of Sydney and they will tell you that the majority of listings are rooms in “ordinary people’s homes”.
Yes, you say, but that’s the figure for the whole of Sydney. What about the beach suburbs and inner city where your activities are most concentrated?
“More than 80 percent of people in Sydney approve of Airbnb,” they claim.
Most questions are met with another reply about ordinary people and sharing and making ends meet and student loans and cancer operations and blah-de-blah-de-blah. What you never get is how much online short-stay letting agencies make in major metropolitan markets from multiple listings of whole-home lets by commercial landlords. Share that!
STUPID
I strongly suspect that when the government releases its response to the committee report on the “adequacy of short-term and holiday letting legislation” in April next year, we will be presented with a sugar-coated pill that will be poison for strata schemes.
Apparently, according to a reliable source inside the NSW parliamentary inquiry, the committee members fell on the idea of “party houses” like Tasmanian Devils on a dead wallaby. This, they decided was the only real problem with short-stay letting, especially in apartments.
Thus, they casually dismissed apartment owners concerns about additional wear and tear, privacy, security and the conflict between families in party mode and residents who, until now, were legally entitled to a quiet life.
They agreed strata schemes were a special case – but not THAT special. So they favoured going down the road proposed in Victoria where, if behavior by short-stay guests in an apartment turned out to be really bad, neighbours could take them to the Tribunal.
Now, that particular proposal was clearly written by people who have never had to pursue a strata by-law breach, even when you know exactly who has done what and which law they were breaking.
Trying to chase down long-gone party animals and their elusive hosts – all of which has to be done by the rest of the building owners’ expense – is a joke, frankly. And that is probably why the Victorian Upper House laughed it out of parliament last month and sent the Fair Trading minister away to think again.
OK, Macquarie St, where’s your “adequate” legislation now?
IF IT AIN’T BROKE …
The great irony in all of this is that we, in apartments, don’t need the legislation to change. The committee noted that they hadn’t had many complaints from apartment buildings. Why? Maybe it’s because most of us who don’t want short-stay letting in our strata schemes are able to keep it under control.
It’s a weird kind of logic that says, “hey, we haven’t had any complaints about this so let’s change the laws and see what happens.” It’s a bit like saying nobody complains about smoking in restaurants any more so let’s allow people to light up again.
Under the proposed legislation changes, such protections as we have will be swept away and it won’t be “ordinary people” who will benefit. It will be commercial landlords and people who don’t give a stuff about their neighbours and the effect their behavior has on their communities.
So, here’s a message to all you politicians. We are the ordinary people and strata is already a sharing economy. We share our facilities, our bills, our responsibilities and our sense of ‘home’.
If you want to change the law to allow our shared economy to be hived off to commercial interests in the hope of appearing to be trendy and innovative, you need to take a long hard look at yourselves … and then go and live for a year in an apartment block where holiday letting is allowed to run riot.