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[Jimmy-T]

The war against party flats took a turn for the worse last week when the Supreme Court in Melbourne overturned a decision by the Victorian Buildings Appeals Board that short-term rentals were illegal in residential apartment blocks.

The BAB ruling had said that if you were going to rent out apartments like hotel rooms, you needed the same levels of fire safety precaution and signage as hotels.

But then the manager of several units in a  building in Docklands (dubbed ‘Partygate’ by residents sick of the weekend invasions of drunks) appealed, saying that the BAB ruling was invalid.

Despite arguments from Melbourne city planners, the court agreed, overturning the ruling.

Here in NSW, the lobbyists for the short-term rental industry will claim this as a victory for traditional Australian family holidays.

However, long-suffering neighbours know it’s all too often really about marauding schoolies, backpackers, football fans and bucks nights invading their homes.

Sydney City Council refers to agents revving up owners to turn their residential flats into virtual hotels as “re-zoning by stealth”.  Pity the poor long-term resident who finds him or herself outvoted by absentee landlords lured by the fast-buck  agents promoting illegal rentals.

It’s back to the drawing board for Melbourne’s city council while in Brisbane apparently it’s got so bad that some owner-residents are being driven out of their buildings by on-site managers irritated that there are flats in their buildings from which they don’t earn any rental commission

How selfish of us to want peace and quiet in our homes when there are owners who need to make a quick buck from their investment units.

As we have said many times in this column, if there is a such a screaming need for short-term accommodation in our cities, then let the developers build specific buildings for the fly-by-night tenants.

Short-term lets are warts on the face of residential apartment living and it’s time the government and local councils got together with the CTTT and burned them off.

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I see this from a different perspective as I actually own property in the Watergate building and have been living there from day one. Right from the conception of the building 10 years ago there has been short stay accommodation. We were initially going to let the developer run our property short term but ended up moving into it. My wife’s parents are from Hong Kong and we lease out an apartment short term from the operator who has taken this issue to the Supreme Court and won. We love being able to rent one of these apartments, so that my wife’s parents can stay close to us and be more in a home environment rather than stay in a hotel. To be honest with you we get more problems with the long term tenants not the short stay ones and the management never seem to do anything about the long term tenants. We have prostitutes, drug dealers and bikie groups who reside in the building. We have never felt safe living in the building because of the seedy people that reside as long term tenants. We did have a problem with another short term operator who has since gone, they would have not have survived because they had poor business ethics but I don’t understand why the whole industry has to be shut down because of one bad egg. We don’t stop all the plastic surgeons just because one does a shoddy job! The other operator who are fighting this are extremely professional and from what I can see never cause any problems. What has stirred up the residents is the way the body corporate has handled the whole case, from putting up abusive and insensitive posters in the lifts, they are just so negative. Also they have taken it upon themselves to spend our money which amounted to around $122,000 which we were unaware of until we read about it in the papers. Then to find out that the body corp didn’t need to get involved and could have left it up to the council to sort out really infuriates us as owners, who were never consulted. The other problem is if they do the do change the rules, unfortunately that will be the end of Docklands and Southbank. Apartment prices will plummet, there will be an influx of apartments on the market for sale and rent. Forget about poor old New Quay that will turn into a ghost town and also don’t even think about staying on the Gold Coast as there will be no apartments to stay in.

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