Thanks Whale. An interesting read.
I think this proposal serves well the financial interests of Real Estate Agents, Property Managers, and those renting their Residential properties as Tourist and Visitor accommodation. One asks: is this not mere ‘window dressing’ to skirt around a breach of the Environmental, Planning & Protection Act plus the shocking array of issues that short-term lettings create?
Alas I fail to see how it affords any protection to those using their Residential property as their residence or those renting their Residential property to a leaseholder who in turn use the property as their permanent residence.
Investors who want to invest in this type of accommodation – short-term lets – should feel free to invest in hotels/serviced apartment/holiday complexes and the like.
The investors involved in the practice of short-term letting DON’T live in the properties so don’t suffer the blight of constant ‘comings and goings’, disturbance, abuse of common property areas, risk to health/safety/life etc that short-term lets in Residential properties create. They are also blind to the fact that their short-term financial gain is the long-term financial loss of everyone, themselves included.
Where I live, ‘peak-season’ is every week of the year. One can monitor daily the short-term ‘occupation rate’ in our building by simply checking the ‘availability’ on websites such as ‘Wotif’, ‘lastminute.com’ – indeed the list of sites where our building is advertised goes on for web page after web page.
From someone who lives in a Residential building where large-scale short-term letting is organised, operated and protected by our ‘Caretaker’ (whose only ‘care’ is what he can ‘take’ from the OC/our building) and our Executive Committee Members – they got rid of all the Resident Owners from our EC by way of vote farming at our last AGM: RESIDENTIAL OCCUPATION AND SHORT-TERM TOURIST/VISITOR LETS ARE NOT COMPATIBLE.