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I’ve just done a very quick count (stopped at 20) of really cool looking internet sites offering minimum 30-minute lets in what look like swanky residential apartments. They are all competing to become the airbnb of nano-lets – and I’m coining that term.
Be worried. Be very worried. If you’ve had short-term lets in your building, start getting use to hell-knows-who coming in and out and in and out of your place every 30 minutes of the day and night.
Suggest that your building is going to be overrun with drug/sex/terror hook-ups and you’ll no doubt be told to grow up and get with the 21st Century.
The sharing economy? The screw-you economy.
We should all be lobbying our State Governments right now to protect our communities and our homes…our most valuable assets.
Many people work from home these days. There’s working from home and then there’s running a business from a residential property.Your local council will have a Local Environment Plan (LEP) eg; the City of Sydney’s can be found here.If you’re within the boundaries of your LEP, no sweat. If you’re not, it is effectively a change of use, and your by-laws will almost definitely say that any change of use must be brought to the attention of the Owners Corporation.Everyone has obligations to the OC to ensure that a change of use does not negatively impact on any insurance claim – Lot Owners have unlimited liability.It’s easy enough to establish whether or not what one is doing sits within the parameters of the LEP. Just verify ‘yes’/’no’, out of respect for the others in your OC and in line with the Terms and Conditions of your Strata Scheme’s mandatory building insurance policy.The Tenants Union should be backing a change to the (NSW) Residential Tenancies Act – Section 8 – Agreements to which the Act does not apply by deleting:
c) agreement under which a person boards or lodges with another person.
Boarders and lodges should be granted the same protection under the Act plus be subject to the same obligations under the Act. I thought the NSW Government was considering this as a key component to a review they recently undertook – goodness knows if anything came of it?
This means that people can rent that spare room, offering it to someone who needs a home, and hey presto, earn that extra money they claim they need.
And let me tell you, there’s an enourmous difference between the young couple who now rent the spare room from the guy down the corridor, compared to the holiday/party animals who use to be in and out of here thanks to his Airbnb listings. We’ve got neighbours now, not short-stays who couldn’t give a toss about us and our building.
Keep Airbnb and other short holiday lets out of residential properties. Can’t people see what’s happening to our residential housing stock?
There’s a fundamental incompatibility mixing short-stays with permanent residents – and so judges the NSW Land and Environment Court in multiple examples of case law. Throw that back at the Tenants Union of Victoria.
And just wait until the complaints start from all the tenants who have been turfed out of properties so that landlords can get higher rent from tourists. This is happening repeatedly all over the USA and Europe. Hello Tenants Union – what will you do then?
The way this issue/suggestion has been explained to me by a prominent strata lawyer is that the flip-side of this is that 75% of owners can vote at a general meeting to introduce a by-law which will open the doors to Airbnb and their ilk.
Where I live, this would happen in a flash and it is effectively saying that owners can vote to overturn the zoning on a property so that instead of it being a residential building it becomes a quasi hotel overnight.
I bought an apartment in a building zoned permanent residential occupation only. Where can one buy an apartment in NSW and be sure that in a week or a month or a year’s time it won’t turn into a hotel, with all the expense but minus the infrastructure?
Where’s our community gone?
The fact that the City of Sydney wants to limit the number of days one can short-term let is recognition in itself that short-term lets are fundamentally different to permanent residency. And so, who is going to ‘police’ the maximum number of days regime? Certainly not the City of Sydney!
Lost for more words.
Whale, two years. Try September 2012…google search: Making NSW No. 1 Again: Shaping Future Communities.
We are still waiting. And I think a lot of our problems relating to short-term letting and all sorts of ills in strata stems from government inaction. Imagine if they’d stepped in and started regulating back in 2012! (Hope you can pick up the link below.)
This Government should be up front with strata communities.
Gillian
Everyone will have a very different opinion on short-term letting and all opinions are worth respect.
From the experience in our Residential building – an imagine this replicated State-wide if the NSW Government gives this practice the ‘go ahead’ – a group of investor owners used the building’s Caretaker to rent their apartments short-term, from the very beginning. This is back in the days where the internet was in its infancy and none of us knew anything of Council Planning Regulations. The number of units grew and grew and because one ‘team’ was doing it, they weren’t in any position to stop anyone else. We ended up with on or about 65 units that were short-term let (minimum one night) plus there were a couple of operators with adverts which made it impossible to identify the units they had control of.
Unless someone has lived with this type of activity, I think it is impossible to comprehend what it does to someone’s home life; short, it is destroyed.
When you have such a big block involved in short-term lets they come in and take over complete control of the Strata. Resident Owners/Tenants are then regarded as ‘the enemy’ and have no say whatsoever in the day-to-day finances and running of the property. And some very powerful people can and do start issuing very serious threats when they see their finances potentially compromised.
Cancer: are you happy with one cancer cell floating around your body?
Go figure, and good luck
The Minutes of Executive Committee Meetings that are being distributed for our Strata Scheme are not a true and accurate record of what is taking place at meetings, plus meetings are being held, without an agenda being circulated and without notice of the meeting and without a quorum being reached. The Strata Manager is then ‘ratifying’ decisions taken at an ‘EC’ Meeting in their offices, when the SMA employee is the only person in attendance.
A request was put to the SMA/EC Secretary to add Motions to the next ECM Agenda, correcting what has been presented to the Owners Corporation.
The agenda for the next ECM has just been received – no Motions have been included.
The Strata Managing Agent-come-EC Secretary has placed a Motion on the Agenda which reads:
Motion No. such-and-such: Minutes of last meeting: THAT the minutes of the last Executive Committee Meeting held on __ December be confirmed as a true record of the proceedings of the Meeting. Explanation: Whilst this motion is not a requirement of the act we feel that it is prudent for the minutes of previous meeting(sic) to be confirmed.
I understood that it is a requirement of the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act, and probably every other ‘Act’ in this State, for the previous Minutes of a Meeting to be accepted and physically signed off as a ‘true and accurate‘ record of what transpired. Is this not the case?
From where I stand, it is impossible to keep up with the inventive ways our SMA/EC devise by way of deceiving Owners and manipulating what transpires within our scheme.
I just tried to email Fair Trading…their website seems not to be accepting inquiries
Dear Winston
I too have followed this path, which leads nowhere…except a whole lot more time and energy expanded and utter frustration at the end of the trail.
Strata Community Australia (SCA), as far as I can establish, is set up to support Strata Managers – it’s like a club for Strata Managers. It doesn’t appear to have regulatory oversight of the Industry.
Back to Fair Trading, however Fair Trading doesn’t appear to any longer deal with or attempt to process complaints.
The system seems to be stacked so that in the end people with complaints just have to give up.
Just had to share this! A friend who’s in a Sydney hospital has just posted on Facebook.
“I’m pretty sure the lady in room 830 is dead. I was going to tell the nurse but really, what’s the point? ”
One response: Airbnb*eeded?
And in another post, together with a photo of an old ‘Suggestion Box’, he writes:
“Half the rooms are empty here at the moment. Everyone knows that hospitals are always short of money so I suggested they put the vacant rooms on Airbnb to make some money. At the moment they’re wasting an opportunity.“
Hey mikobrand96
I don’t know that Fair Trading or the NCAT will ever support or even notice a single owner or a small band of owners, especially if there are ‘high powered’ individuals involved in the opposing gang. That said, there are choices:
- Just roll over and let the majority mob of ratbags win – but isn’t that what Malcolm Turnbull referred to as tyranny?
- Or plug away, even if one feels like it’s just a futile exercise in yelling into a vacuum. (Mars, here we come.)
It’s important to always kick back and find something to poke fun at, even if it means simply finding an appropriate, obscure nickname for your adversaries and using it, frequently.
Make sure you laugh and laugh. If your health goes…again they’ve won.
Onward and upwards, always!
mikobrand96
Welcome to my world. Remember something: it’s your home, so don’t budge. When I recently remarked that it was exhausting being unpopular a friend replied: “Hitler was ‘popular.'”
The difference between the NCAT and Fair Trading is understood. That said, I had an interesting conversation with a ‘special units’ person at Fair Trading yesterday. He more-or-less acknowledged that, due to under-funding, unless someone has documentation to support an argument that monies are being stolen from an Owners Corporation, Fair Trading isn’t resourced to really investigate anything. It has been obvious to me for a long, long time that, even though Fair Trading has issued a special reference number our particular NSW Strata building, all my correspondence to them goes down into a bottomless black hole, and I said as much to my interlocutor. The Fair Trading chap didn’t deny this. He actually recommend that I not copy Fair Trading on anything, and certainly not write to the Minister.
And then there’s NCAT – no joy, let alone acknowledge of breaches in legislation from them.
In fear of sounding like a broken record: there is legislation aplenty in this State, but just try getting any of it triggered. If one is looking for momentum and action, start walking to Mars instead.
Gents,
All comments are extremely interesting, well considered and very helpful, but I still feel as if I’m being held to ransom by our OC/SMA. The situation in our 160+ NSW Strata:-
The SMA/EC failed to place a Motion on our November AGM following my August 2014 request for bathroom renovations, but did place a Motion on the Agenda for another Owner wanting to renovate their bathroom. The AGM Minutes from November have yet to be distributed.
The SMA confirms no charge to put a Motion on the Agenda for the AGM.
Prior to the AGM the SMA, who acts as our OC’s Secretary, failed to respond to my written requests and questions about bathroom renovations in the two month period allowable under Section 138 (2)(b) of the SSMA.
SMA quotes: $5,000.00-$7,000.00 for ‘Admin’ to organise an EGM, payable by the Lot Owner to the SMA (of course). To date, two Owners have complied, ‘paper’ EGMs have been called, quorums for these EGMs have not been reached – no Minutes of the EGMs distributed – so these Owners have been given ‘conditional approval, ie a wink and a nod, by the SMA at subsequent ‘paper ECMs’ where the Strata Manager was the only person present, to proceed with renovations…after all, the Owners had paid the SMA $5,000-$7,000 each in ‘admin’ charges.
As well, the Tenant of one Commercial Lot has twice, in the last 18 months, completely guttered and done a major fit out including changes to common property wiring, walls etc, all with approval at EC level (not at a General Meeting), with no undertaking necessary re Bonds, assuming responsibility to the OC in the case of faulty workmanship etc.
With 160+ Lots, it’s close to impossible to engage Owners in a paper EGM over Bathroom renovations (let alone anything else) and to reach a quorum.
This is therefore turning out to be an absolute mini-gold mine for our SMA, who I don’t trust for a second.
Have just had some neighbours drop in for a Friday arvo G&T – they were wanting updates of what’s going on in our mess of a Strata scheme plus they’re profoundly concerned that it looks like the NSW State Govt is about to give Airbnb & Co free rein to take over every residential property in the State.
Still, when I relayed the comment in the post above about bikes gathering “more dust than a politician’s code of ethics” the good neibours almost chocked on their lemon pips.
It’s amazing that in the depths of our ongoing nightmare we find so very, very much to belly laugh at!
Keep up the ‘chat’ and the irreverence JimmyT. It’s so appreciated.
Axl, I wish I could say: “Noooo!”
I can’t.
Brief, the response today is: Anywhere between $5,000-$7,000 to process a request to undertake bathroom renovations plus a $5,000 bond to be returned when and if the Strata Manager is satisfied that the work has been done properly. And yet a commercial lot in our scheme can undertake a full, major fit out including changes to common property twice in two years, all ok’d with a nod from the Executive Committee at an EC Meeting.
This is just the latest example of Owners who have called for compliance with Legislation being held to ransom.
And the NCAT won’t do a thing.
The NCAT Adjudicator six weeks ago manages to list the Applicant and 23 respondents in the official NCAT document (available online – yes?) except for one – a State MP/the now former EC Chairman. But I guess everyone can make a mistake, NCAT Adjudicators included…
Thank goodness this forum gives one somewhere to scream, even if the scream is silent.