Short shrift for airheads

Melbourne city council were due to be back at the Building Appeals Board this past week, to re-argue their case that residential apartment  blocks are no place for short-term holiday lets.

Good on ’em, but they may be fighting an uphill battle as Airbnb and other social media based accommodation websites enable the curse of short-term lets to spread like a computer virus.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Airbnb is a great concept, provided it’s people renting out a spare room in their homes, not a strata parasite letting their whole flat to complete strangers who don’t give a flying focaccia about how much noise they make on their bucks party/footy trip/schoolies week.

Airbnb isn’t blind to these problems. When you register, you have to promise you are not breaching the rules of your building or the terms of your lease, among other reasonable restrictions.

But look for the phone number or email address where you can tell Airbnb that one of their members is busting your by-laws and there is nothing. Nada. Zip.

Seems a bit slack, to set up a system that makes it easier for people to break the law, but then not provide a simple way for the victims to report them and request that they are shut down.

No wonder Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York City has just announced that 72 percent of the Airbnb’s rentals there are illegal.

In the Big Apple, they quite rightly see illegal short-term lets as undermining both their legitimate hotel industry as well as low-cost housing.

In Barcelona earlier this year, the city fined six online agencies, including Airbnb,  $45,000 each for breaching their tourism laws.

And now our cities are getting taking an interest but it will only be a matter of time before the usual suspects come out of the woodwork, claiming banning holiday lets is “unAustralian”.

So let’s make this clear, once and for all.  Residential apartment blocks are not hotels and people who are on holiday behave differently from long-term residents.

You’ll find links to the Airbnb stories mentioned here, here and here.