Mayor Adrian Schrinner says property owners would now need appropriate planning approvals, body corporate support and a 24-7 property manager for short-term rentals
Hard to argue tbh… Is there a negative to something like this I’m not aware of?
Personally I think Airbnb is the stupidest thing going. You pay more than hotel rates, to live in a house you have to clean and tidy yourself and then pay cleaning fees on top, and its often a hassle if anything goes wrong as there’s no responsible party you can approach - Airbnb shrug their shoulders, and the host just hides behind a mobile number they can conveniently turn off.
Have used them a couple of times in the past purely because we had pets and I hated it.
Personally, I prefer an apartment that I have to clean myself, because it means I don’t have to worry about random strangers coming in to my apartment all the time.
Hotels just don’t work for me. They’re completely disconnected from the location and people around them, and full of people just as unfamiliar with the surrounds as I am.
When I was in Puerto Iguazu in Argentina, if we’d have been in a hotel, we’d have been in a sculpted, serviced space completely disconnected from the town around it. Instead, we stayed in a tiny little apartment in the back streets of the town. We got to actually see and experience the place, in a way that would have been impossible with a hotel.
Even if changes like this become universal (and I hope they do) I’ll likely to continue to use Airbnb over hotels when I can.
People are always treating Airbnbs and hotels like they fulfill the exact same role, but personally i’ve never had much luck in finding a hotel that offers a full kitchen for a reasonable rate, much less offered the sort of continuous interior space most Airbnbs can, and which is great if you tend to travel on tips with both your and extended family.
Short term rentals should definitely be more regulated, but it amazes me that condos, but rented and for poor people took so long to really become common.
I prefer an apartment that I have to clean myself
The shitty thing is that you have to clean it yourself and then they charge a “cleaning fee”.
In Australia, I’ve also seen a relative rise of what are basically just hotels. The Airbnbs I’ve used overseas (admittedly not recently) have felt just like what you described. In Australia they’ve felt more like an apartment or townhouse bought by someone with the explicit intent to rent out as an Airbnb, with a whole bunch in the same building or complex owned for that purpose—or at least the vibe that that’s the case. A couple in Brisbane that my parents have used a few times when visiting is even in the same building as a hotel. Some rooms are hotel, others are privately-owned apartments, many of which are seemingly Airbnbs. (One of said hotels made the news recently for a really awful cockroach infestation, which is neat…) You feel just as disconnected from the city as you would in a hotel. Perhaps even more so, since in a hotel there’s at least a semblance of a sense of connectedness to other hotel patrons, which you lose in these hotel-based Airbnbs.
I hate airbnb. I live in a place in the US that depends on tourism that also has a bad housing shortage for locals who cannot find affordable rentals. Tourists come and pay the excessive prices to stay at airbnb places that should instead be used for long term rentals to the actual residents who live here. Tourists should go to hotels which are meant for them instead of wrecking the housing market.
I spent years being homeless because the little long term rentals that open up every so often have such high prices. I have stayed at places that were unpermitted since that’s what I could afford, I cannot stress how awful it was being off-grid away from town with no transportation. No bathroom either. Power, outlets, etc. completely exposed. And when I finally got section 8 (after years of waiting for an opening and then years waiting for the selection to happen), no landlord would lower the price or even rent to someone using section 8 so I had to “network” to find someone that would let me rent with them as long as I illegally gave them extra money every month since they felt their property has more value than what section 8 covers, oh also lease says utilities included but you need to pay for your own utilities. Yeah every landlord I’ve had with section 8 has done that so far because section 8 pays more if utilities are included. We need rent control and airbnb banned asap. We are not doing OK.
Part of this comes about because of bad local government policies. Airbnb being used for housing would be much less of a problem if:
- There were more hotels. Why aren’t these people going to the existing hotels? Are they too expensive? What causes that? Not enough competition? Do local zoning ordnances forbid the creation of more hotels entirely, or make it prohibitively expensive? Or
- There was more actual housing available for residents. Australia has this problem too, though not nearly to the same extent as America, from what I’ve seen. Zoning is far too restrictive on housing, making the provision of enough housing impossible. Remove restrictions on medium-density housing entirely, and ease them up to allow more high-density housing in key areas nearest to the major employment centres and major transport hubs. Also: governments should directly fund the building of a whole heap of housing themselves.
Restrictions on Airbnb are a good idea, in my mind, but they’re a bandaid solution. They don’t address the underlying issue, which is that there literally isn’t enough housing to satisfy demand for residents, and in some tourist areas there aren’t enough hotels at the price points customers are demanding.
The biggest long-term problem with Airbnb, which would still exist even if housing were abundant, is its unregulated nature. Its customers need to be assured that they can get reliable help if there is a major fault with the service, just like they could with any other business. Regulating them like hotels, with some easing of that regulation in some aspects (but not the key ways affecting customer experience) for Airbnbs that are used only for a few weeks per year while the long-term resident is away, is something that needs to happen regardless.
Needing proper planning approvals is a no-brainer. Technically, this has probably always been required, but they never bothered enforcing it. It’s nice to see that that’s going to change.
I strongly oppose the idea that it should need body corporate support. The body corporate should function to maintain and upgrade the property and its facilities. They shouldn’t be able to tell you how you use your own apartment. They already have too much control over such things. My body corporate is actually really good, but our by-laws theoretically give it the power to say you can’t dry your clothes on your balcony, and that’s just not ok in my opinion. Allowing the body corporate to tell you what you can do with your apartment is very in keeping with the LNP’s paternalistic attitude, and it’s gross that they’re using the current anti-Airbnb zeitgeist as an opportunity to reinforce that.
I don’t know what I think about the property manager requirement. Guests at short stay should absolutely have someone they can call if something goes wrong. If that’s all this means, no issue. But if there’s some specific qualification or accreditation that person needs, or it has to be anything more than “phone number of a person who can authorise emergency repairs”, it seems unnecessary.
As a separate point, my biggest question is: how is any of this going to affect temporary Airbnbs? The original selling point of Airbnb was that you can rent out your place while you’re away on holiday, to help subsidise your trip. The article gives no indication of how people who use it in this way will be affected. I don’t think it should mitigate the requirement that a guest be able to call someone in an emergency, but it should mean you don’t need the same kind of planning approval and don’t pay a higher rates fee. And it’s a situation where the body corporate should absolutely have no control, even if someone were willing to give them power over more permanent Airbnbs.
I’m dubious this will have any effect, but at least it’s trying something. I’m sure other cities & states will be watching…
With the nation wide housing issues, it can’t be solved with one silver bullet, it needs many policies to work together. Every little thing helps.
Yeah completely agree. There are a wide range of policies that can help out with our current housing crisis. Many of which will have varying impacts depending not just on how they themselves are implemented, but on which other policies are enacted alongside them, with some policies helping to reinforce each other as more than the sum of their parts.
This one I think is worth doing, because it will help. But it’s also likely to be one of the smaller impacts of the various things I can think of. The article says that they are aware of just 400 places right now. Doubtless it will end up being more than that, but that still gives you the sense of just how small it’ll really be.
It really feels like a ‘Do something, anything!’ situation.
To use a cricket analogy, take any easy singles now, and you can hit the boundaries when(if?) they come.
Maybe, except I’m not convinced there’s any desire with the LNP especially to actually hit those boundaries. They’d rather hit a couple of singles to get people off their back, and leave it at that.
Yeah, when so many of the elected have investment properties, there’s no incentive to change the way things are 😔
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“If you are in an apartment building, and your neighbour wants to switch over to short-stay accommodation, the body corporate doesn’t have the power to effectively decide whether that can or can’t happen,” Schrinner said.
The demand for rentals has also skyrocketed, with Brisbane facing a 0.9% vacancy rate and rent prices have risen 9.3% over the past year.
As the housing supply crisis wreaks havoc across Australia, other states such as New South Wales are considering introducing a short-term accommodation levy to encourage owners to put their properties back on the long-term market.
Strata Community Association Queensland (SCAQ) general manager Laura Bos backed the council plan.
“This would allow, among other things, body corporate committees to pass a by-law prohibiting or restricting short-stay accommodation for non-owner occupiers,” she said.
“In response to the Brisbane City Council proposal to introduce a new permit on short-term rental accommodation (STRA) providers, Stayz encourages the council to wait for what we understand will be a state-led regulatory regime being implemented,” senior director of government and corporate affairs, Eacham Curry, said.
The original article contains 542 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Airbnb has a place when you want to rent a larger property. This used to be difficult and complicated. As a general rule I agree though. Airbnb is pretty shit compared to most hotels in most places.
