Look, we know that with half of Sydney under water and the other half trapped at the airport, thoughts of holidays are far from our minds.
But foreign tourists are soon going to start trickling, then flooding back and our governments have done nothing to tackle the crisis in housing caused by rental accommodation being given over to holiday lets.
However, one Flatchatter, in response to my column in the AFR at the weekend (expanded here), has come up with a genius plan that would help to fix housing affordability and curb the impending spread of holiday lets in one fell swoop.
Not only that, it would help the Labor Party to very gently take it’s first much-desired steps towards scrapping negative gearing. That’s HERE.
And while we’re on the subject of holiday lets, I’ve come across a couple of scandalous reports this week.
The first is from the Shelter housing charity in Tasmania, a state that has seven times the rate of residential properties converted to holiday homes than even Sydney.
Things are so bad there that if just two more properties out of every 1000 were to convert to holiday lets, the rental availability from would halve from 2 per cent to 1.
Then I chanced upon a page on the Melbourne residents action group website welivehere.net which says that despite myriad complaints about wild parties in short-term rentals, the Victorian Tribunal has not penalised a single host, property or guest for their abhorrent behaviour in residential buildings.
By the way, the Melbourne people think they have by far the worst short-term letting laws in the whole of Australia, and they have compiled a list to prove it.
Elsewhere on the Forum
- The case of the missing strata committee member unfolds, as we get more detail on the owner who got themselves elected, then took off for a year, leaving a “proxy” with a mate. That’s HERE.
- When Fair Trading didn’t know there was a Property Services Commissioner and offered up the wrong Mr Minns. That’s HERE.
- Do we need to pay to fix “drummy” tiles – they sound wrong but they’re not broken. That’s HERE.
- Can we take a paper vote to overturn a physical vote that didn’t allow payment plans for levy debts? That’s HERE.
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