Like a wayward teenager who stayed out too late, Airbnb is creeping back into our lives, hoping to avoid our parental wrath, but finding a less than loving reception waiting for it.As we discuss in this week’s podcast, the holiday/retirement town of Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, has had enough of badly behaved holiday renters’ shenanigans.In a few weeks the shire council there will bring in a “rapid response” hotline on which neighbours can report disruptive behaviour – that’s the old-fashioned version of disruption when it was a bad thing – and a designated responder will be expected to attend and deal with the problem.Also this week the University of NSW has issued the second stage of a comprehensive report that shows that wherever Airbnb and other holiday letting agencies are most active, residential rents go up and housing availability goes down.Before you file that in the “well, d’uh!” folder, bear in mind that this is the kind of credible information that politicians are obliged to consider when they are devising their policies in the great juggle of housing affordability, rents, investments and income and jobs from tourism.Perhaps in this pre-post-pandemic period, we should reflect on what happens in your favourite cafes when the waiters and baristas aren’t around; now because of covid, but in the future when they are driven out by Airbnb-inflated rents.The forces closing in on Airbnb and holiday rentals generally will be the topic of this week’s Flat Chat column in the Australian Financial Review but you can hear a sneak preview here.Also in this week’s podcast we look at the 50-storey Sydney apartment block where the intercom hasn’t worked for more than four years, meaning residents can't get deliveries and have to travel down in the lift to let visitors in.In the podcast we ask, if overseas students can rig up a mobile phone to trigger the access button on their overcrowded flat’s intercom, how come the Park Regis owners corporation say commercial operators can’t be trusted to fix the system?And, finally, prompted by this post to the Forum, we examine the standard strata management contract and flag the idea that it needs to be fairer and maybe even a standard mandatory document, like the residential rental lease.TRANSCRIPT IN FULLSue 00:00Suddenly, there's a lot happening, especially around Airbnb. Yes, it's been a bit quiet for a while, hasn't it?Jimmy 00:05Yes, I thought it had kind of settled, and because everybody went away, a lot of the Airbnb properties ceased to be and went back into the residential rental market... We'll be talking about that. We'll be talking about people saying that the standard strata management contract needs to be revised and we're going to talk about the woman who lives in an apartment, where she has to go down 20-odd flights and lift, to let people in, because the Owners Corporation won't fix the intercom system.Sue 00:41Well, they say they can't, but the fact is, it's been broken for about four years, I think now. It's a pretty bad state of affairs.Jimmy 00:49I don't believe that it is impossible to fix things like that; it's just difficult and it's one of these things that can find its way into a too-hard
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.
