How do we stop short-term letting?

Your by-law demanding compliance with the DA for the building should be enough.  Your challenge is to prove that the visitors are holiday rentals.

Strategically placed cameras on common property should gather the evidence you need and but you can start issuing Notices To Comply as soon as you are sure short-term letting is occurring.

Our friends BnbGuard will help with the evidence gathering.

Regarding the cancelling of swipe cards, what I would do is send out a notice to all owners that they are required by law to register the names of their tenants (under Section 258 of the strata Act), subject to a maximum fine of $550. Fourteen days after you issue the notice, you announce an “audit” of all swipe cards, citing concerns about security breaches.

This audit will require the registered tenant to present their swipe card and 100 points worth of identification, to the building manager, strata manager or secretary on a certain date. After that, you could just cancel the cards and say unknown people had been seen entering the building and the cards were cancelled as part of a follow-up to the security audit.

Be ready for very angry holidaymakers who can’t get into the building and homicidal holiday rental “hosts” who will soon be losing money hand over fist.  But if you hit them hard with every option available to you, they’ll soon get the message and go elsewhere.

But call Bnbguard – they are the experts in this.

The ATO will happily accept information about anyone raising income and potentially not declaring it for tax purposes.

The local council will do nothing becasue they don’t have the financial wherewithall to pursue planning breaches of this nature (which is precisely how Airbnb gets into residential markets all around the world).

And NCAT love videos, emails, diaries, written records and recordings as evidence of breaches – otherwise it’s just “he said, she said”.

I don’t know what kind of advice your strata manager is giving you but the new laws on short-term letting haven’t come in yet so I can’t see how they can base their advice on results issued by NCAT under the old laws.

The old  (curent) laws depend on the part of strata law that says you can’t interfere with the buying sell of leasing of a lot.  That is interpreted as meaning you can’ prvent people from doing what they want with their property, in terms of leasing it.

Most strata lawyers whom I know say that, under current legislation, if you have a DA that says no holiday letting and you pass a by-law saying you support your council DA, then that is perfectly legal.

The thinking is that, as the owner never had the right to have short-term letting to begin with, you are not interfering with nayone’s rights by imposing a by-law that says you are going to ensure owners abide by the law.

It’s when you start allowing holiday letting with conditions that you are in breach of strata law, because you are then giving the owner the right to breach your planning regs, and then trying to control it.

I think your strata manager has given you really bad advice and I would seek a second opinion from an experienced strata lawyer before you register the new by-law (which I think may be in breach of strata law anyway, and therefore invalid).

You’re right that the committee can’t just cancel swipe cards, at least not legally, but they can restrict swipe cards to registered residents.

The law demands that the owners corporation be informed of any changes to the lease of a lot, with information provided as to the identity of the new resident. This is routinely ignored by holiday letting hosts who want their guests to have the same rights of access as residential tenants, but don’t want to tell us who they are.

Short-term letting agencies expect us to stick to the letter of the law when it suits them and ignore the law, such as  the terms of development approvals (namely, no holiday lets) when it doesn’t.

So I would make it a security issue. Announce that there will be a periodic audit of the swipe cards for security reasons that may result in swipe cards being cancelled when they are held by someone other than the registered leaseholder or their registered sub-tenant.

Some buildings even have a system that matches the face registered on the computer with the face of the person trying to gain access.  Others use fingerprint technology, especially to restrict access to facilities.

As for the threat of legal action – personally, I would push it to the limit (mediation) then back down and find another way of frustrating these parasites.