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[Jimmy-T]

Have Sydney’s rental vacancy rates turned the corner?  With a rise in the availability of properties to 2 percent, while hardly easy, life could be getting less stressful for renters.
Many new apartments, preferred by renters and investors, have come on to the market and a recent report by  BIS Shrapnel says around 5,800 units are currently under construction and predicts another  11,500 will be finished over the next three years.
Experts say that will inevitably lead to an easing of the rental pressures and, ultimately, a drop in purchase prices. 
However, it’s not all good news. There are fears that many new properties currently being aggressively marketted overseas will be left empty for years. Overseas investors can only legally purchase new properties.
Another issue with that is that unpaid levies can mount up and thatseriously bimpacts on owners’ corporations abbilities to maintain their properties to the standards they might wish or even those demanded by lwa.  It is notoriously hard to chase unpaid levies from overseas owners.
Even if overseas investors are paying their levies, they tend, for a variety of reasons both cultural and practical, to be less engaged with their strata community which leaves owners corps wide open to proxy farming, where one owner can run a whole building to suit themselves, using proxy votes acquired from absentee investors and disengaed owners.
Sydney is not the first world city to suffer the blight of “buy-and-leave” homes.  In London, where half the units in some blocks sit empty, Islington Council has proposed a $100,000 tax on new apartments that are left unoccupied and the recent UK budget had plans to charge 15 percent stamp duty on them.
Could a no-tenant tax happen here? Or will we wait for the first block where the lights are on but nobody’s home? There’s more on this on the Forum and you can read a lively discussion about this article in the SMH online HERE. 

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