Short-Term Accommodation
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.
Noosa Today Article 2024
Supporting Noosa’s new housing initiatives
Noosa has a population of around 50,000 people and we receive 2 million visitors a year. The cost of servicing this huge number of visitors is a great impost on ratepayers and the burden on residents. This is particularly so for those living as in the tourism zones, since the short-term accommodation (STA) situation is overcoming the amenity and infrastructure of Noosa’s coastal residential precincts.
Other popular tourist destinations are making plans to enact a citywide ban on all short-term rentals. From 2028, Barcelona, a city with about 10,000 houses registered as rentals for tourists, has stopped issuing new licenses and won’t renew existing ones because the city has a housing crisis and soaring rents. According to Mayor Jaume Collboni, the measures are “to provide more supply so that the working middle class does not have to leave the city because they can’t afford housing,”
In Noosa, Airbnb have written to their Noosa Shire property owners alerting them to the fact that council is proposing to severely limit short-term rental accommodation in its proposed amendments to the Noosa Plan 2020. They are worried STA, “won’t be viewed as a ‘consistent use’ in medium, high, or rural residential zones, unless it is a primary residence”. And primary residences will only be able to be shared a maximum of four times per calendar year, for a maximum of 60 days.
In the Airbnb communique, they urge owners to tell council, “STA provides competition in the accommodation sector, giving people greater choice and helping make prices fairer. Critically, Queensland currently has a bed shortage, especially in the lead up to the 2032 Olympics. Remind policymakers that STA provides surge support for the major events Noosa Council delivers, including the Noosa Marathon, Surfilm Festival, and Noosa Polo. If people can’t find accommodation, they can’t attend the events.” It’s very unfair for Noosa residents to be told they must make sacrifices to ensure the many annual events can continue, especially considering the disruption these events cause many. As for the Brisbane Olympics, it really isn’t imperative for us to give up homes for an event in 2032!
Airbnb also says: “Despite the exemption on current listings, we need to make our voices heard, so that Noosa Council doesn’t cap Airbnbs and allows families a choice in accommodation when visiting for work, holidays, or personal reasons.” This at a time when Noosa residents are dealing with structural changes to our community, and at a time when we have a Destination Management Plan (DMP) being formulated after much community consultation. And, when we are trying hard to get the balance right between residential amenity and a housing crisis primarily brought on and encouraged by the digital disruption of our once well-regulated accommodation industry.
Two years ago, council indicated to Tourism Noosa that it’s funding for the second tranche of their quadrennial council subsidy, soon due for renewal, and worth $5.0 million over two years, would be tied to an agreement to address the issues we face with their destination promotion methodology. Basically, the aim is to get them back on track with their promotions to encourage visitation from high value, low volume visitors as opposed to the low value, high volume visitors we have been seeing in recent years. Let’s see the DMP fast-tracked so that we can begin to reclaim the Noosa we know and love.
Consultation on the Noosa Plan amendments closes on 14 July 2024. Please have your say via the council website to support council’s efforts to improve resident amenity and alleviate local congestion.
Rod Ritchie
President
Cooroy Area Residents Association