› Flat Chat Strata Forum › Living in strata › Fair Trading lays down the law on holiday lets › Current Page
Firstly, those links (above) are really interesting and should serve as a warning to anyone in a “hot” holiday letting area as to what will happen in your building if the state government gives in to pressure to open our blocks to online holiday letting agencies.
I’m not surprised at the Qld approach, as its strata schemes were set up as holiday lets primarily and full-time residential accommodation as an afterthought.
I spoke recently to Gary Bugden who helped to formulate the Qld strata regs all those years ago and he told me he presented the government with a two-strand model. One options was for holiday letting with caretaker management contracts sold prior to occupancy and the other was more like the NSW model with owners able to choose who managed their buildings once they had set up their owners corps.
Apparently Queensland developers choked on the mangoes when they heard the second option and saw it would cost them revenue so they told the government it was too complicated to have two models running in parallel which is why Qld has the fundamentally corrupted system that it is now trying to find a way out of.
The pre-sale of management rights in Qld is an indelible stain on the strata system there and, by the way, Strata Community Australia should be ashamed of their vocal support for it.
Do I exaggerate? Consider this – one of the biggest operators of unit block management rights in SE Queensland is the same company that runs schoolies weeks on the Gold Coast. Need I say more?