Short Term Accommodation Issues
Newsletter – April 2018
Short Term Rentals
Joint CARA and Noosa Shire Residents & Ratepayers Association Meeting
6:00pm, Wednesday 18 April, Noosa Lions Football Club, Eenie Creek Road
Speakers
Tony Wellington, Mayor, Noosa Council
Sandy Bolton MP, State Member For Noosa
Elizabeth Reynolds, Deputy Chair, Tourism Noosa
Christopher John, CEO United Synergies
Adrienne Penny, Airbnb host
Topics
• What’s happening with Airbnb locally?
• Hear the latest from Council, State and other interested stakeholders.
• Have you concerns? Do you support Airbnb? Are you a supplier?
Come along and share your views and ask questions.
Short Term Rental Public Meeting, 18April 2018
Preliminary report
This is an interesting discussion here about the complexities of the short-term rental phenomenon. I believe that last night’s meeting proved that no one size fits all as far as the rental impacts go and ditto there’s no one solution to fix the obvious anomalies.
Over 200 people turned up to hear the mayor, Noosa’s new MP, and speakers from United Synergies, Tourism Noosa and an airbnb host talk about the evolving changes to house letting and its disruptive effects on communities and, indeed, the business models of the rental industry, including property managers who see their lucrative business models upset by central booking agencies.
Mayor Tony Wellington, spoke first and had researched to topic thoroughly with charts and tables explaining what was happening here and elsewhere. He believes there are around 3,000 properties in the shire used for short-term lets. These range from single rooms let by empty nesters, to whole houses that are short-term rented on a permanent basis. Council research showed that 40% of houses in Witta Circle, for example, were in this latter category.
Sandy Bolton MP touched on the issue of those displaced by pressures on the total housing stock, but admitted that she did not not have the hard facts on local disruption.
Christopher John from United Synergies said it was difficult to find low-cost housing for vulnerable people to rent and that most of those people were young.
Elizabeth Reynolds from Tourism Noosa defended her group’s marketing strategies, saying that it has been years since they promoted Noosa to the local day tripper market, instead going for “high value” visitors from Sydney, Melbourne and overseas. Her argument is that these people often don’t bring a car, stay within walking distance of attractions and restaurants, and their bigger spend puts more dollars into the community for less deleterious effects on local amenity.
James Taylor from the Noosa Waters Resident’s Association expressed the concerns about short-term rentals on the fabric of the community.
Adrienne Penny, a Sunshine Beach resident is an experienced airbnb operator who lives in her home and rents out a part to visitors. These are generally people she enjoys meeting and the income supplements her part-time wage. She also offers her home midweek free as respite accommodation to carers of sick people. Hers was one of only about 100 properties that Council has placed the tourism levy on. She considers $1,600 per annum for this fee a bit steep and it is the same rate paid by someone in her suburb renting a whole house. The meeting consensus was that this inequity needs to be corrected.
Q&A
A long Q&A session allowed attendees to ask questions, vent their concerns, and learn from both the panel and each other. Questions included: how to protect those with property management rights; where is the tourism levy spent; the impacts of so-called party houses; zoning for de-facto tourism operations in residential zones and their compliance with accommodation safety, infrastructure and occupant capacity
regulations; the use of the tourism levy to fund infrastructure, not just tourism promotion; and how to identify short-term rental properties and their owners when names and addresses are not used on accommodation websites.
Since the legislation needed to address these problems must come from the state government, it’s fortunate that Mayor Wellington, who put a motion to last year’s LGAQ Annual Conference calling for a state government reference group to be established on short-term rentals, has been appointed to this new board as one of just two Queensland councils represented. He is hoping that new legislation will give local government more powers to regulate an industry that has many anomalies. He was quick to point out that council had no intention of banning short-term rental agencies, rather making things equitable for all concerned.
Newsletter – June 2021
Introduction of Local Laws for Short Term Lets
The proposed local laws aim to manage the potential impacts of short-stay letting and home-hosted accommodation on the residential amenity of permanent residents by requiring a local management framework and code of conduct for guest behaviour and minimum safety standards for guests. The local laws will also regulate the ongoing operation of short-stay letting and home-hosted accommodation.