Sometimes you can be just too efficient. There we were with the NSW government's proposed regulations on short-term letting hot off the printer, plus industry responses and reactions from apartment owners ... then the Government panicked in the face of widespread complaints from all directions and put them on hold.Just as well this week’s podcast also deals with those other perennial issues in strata – parking and defects.However, our chat about the now-shelved short-term rentals code of conduct and related regulations - which seem to have annoyed just about everyone on all sides - is still relevant because these issues aren't going to go away, even if the solutions are seen to be more of a problem than the problem.As detailed here, Planning NSW had done a magnificent job in uniting both pro and anti-holiday letting bodies … if only in everyone being cheesed off with the state’s planners.The changes have been delayed until November 1 to "give everyone a chance to adjust." Have a listen and see what we need but aren't going to get until November at the soonest. And see if you can tell which policies will survive six months of pressure from Airbnb and Stayz.Oh, and apologies to anyone who tried to listen to the podcast but couldn't. Not our fault - there was just some glitch somewhere in the internet. I suspect the Russians, but it's all been fixed now (fingers crossed). Listen HereThen we move on to the prospective property purchaser who found that there’s nothing she or Building Commissioner David Chandler can do about an allegedly defective building that probably should never have had a certificate of occupation issued – certainly not on the basis of the certification signed by an unlicensed and unqualified tradie.In Maryam Behrouz’s case, the building has been certified for occupation, the developer denies the claims of serious defects and she either has to complete the purchase or walk away from her $65,000 deposit.In Mr Chandler’s situation, this all happened before he was given the power to block certification and as a result, he says, it’s not in his domain.Fair Trading – the department in charge of builders, tradies, strata and certifiers – typically, says it has nothing to do with the problem as it’s “contractual”. Some things never change.And finally, we float the idea of providing a service that can move illegally parked cars without towing them. Have a look at the video along with this story and see what you think.That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.Transcript in fullJimmy 00:00We had a bit of a podder's nightmare this week. We prepared our episode for this week's podcast, all about the new Airbnb or short term letting laws and regulations and what we thought was good and what we thought was not so good.And we got it all packaged up and ready to go out. And late on Tuesday night after the podcast had gone out, the government changed its mind in the face of some fairly hostile criticism and decided to postpone everything until November.Now that left us with our podcast having gone out to the world, and us commenting on something that's still gonna happen, it's just not going to happen very soon or in the form that possibly we had thought it wo
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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.
