The first of a two-part report on Noosa’s response to short-term letting and the housing crisis, by PHIL JARRATT
When Airbnb, the fastest-growing marketer of short-term accommodation in the world, made its first inroads into Australia a dozen years ago, Noosa was too busy to notice, deep in the fight to win back an independent council after five years in the wilderness of amalgamation.
With control over the complex issues of what we now call STA seemingly stalled for the past year while the impact of the new local law regulation was assessed, you could be forgiven for thinking we were still back there in the mists of a time when letting someone market your house or granny flat seemed like a harmless cottage industry, but as councillors and staffers put their snouts back in the Pelican Street trough last week after the holiday break, some were arguing with conviction that short term letting and its link to the housing crisis was poised to become the biggest issue of the coming council elections.
Adding fuel to the fire was the social media release of a hard-hitting short video called Welcome To Noosa – Where Neighbours Are Strangers. Written and produced by Rod Ritchie, convenor of Residents For Noosa, for the associated group Noosa Residents Against Unregulated Short Term Accommodation, the video pulls no punches in calling Noosa Council to task over its inability to control or contain “whole streets and suburbs of Noosa [which] have been converted from housing to commercial accommodation businesses”.
Veteran newsreader Mike Higgins’ solemn voice-over continues: “Many residents support home-hosted accommodation but object when whole houses become unstaffed, under-regulated mini-motels. Residents hoped the local law would limit and control the proliferation of these short stay letting businesses but that clearly hasn’t happened. Numbers have grown … Living in the shire has become a nightmare for some residents, and the social fabric of long-established residential communities has been disrupted.”
The video continues: “The corrosive effects of short term letting on the mental health and wellbeing of residents is well known. Many property owners have been forced to sell. House prices have soared. Affordable rental accommodation has disappeared. Workers are unable to find housing in the shire and as a result fewer locals are employed by the council or are available for the delivery of essential services.”
Finally it makes this powerful demand: “Residents want council to do more than pay lip service to their concerns. Council must … ensure visitors, property owners and council staff are aware of council’s commitment to the local law; notify neighbours and seek and consider submissions from them when short term letting applications are under consideration for approval; undertake a comprehensive review of the operation and effectiveness of the local law by August 2024; seek community input into that review, especially from neighbours of short term lets; and finally, make real-time data on applications, approvals, registrations and complaints available on council’s website … Noosa Council has allowed Noosa’s coastal suburbs to become dominated by short stay letting. Residential areas are overwhelmed by visitors. Residents want council to enforce the local law. Let’s tell candidates the community is their responsibility, not out-of-shire investors.”
The many residents of Noosa Shire who help pay the mortgage and subsidise a bit of travel by registered holiday letting through Airbnb or one of the other platforms such as Stayz, not to mention the free market thinkers who support them, will claim that Ritchie’s video overstates the case, but a growing number of residents are becoming increasingly alarmed at the constant, ongoing degradation of the amenity of their neighbourhoods through noise, illegal parking and traffic in once-quiet streets. The visuals of the Residents’ video make this case quite convincingly.
Given the considerable divide in our community over the STA issue, it is instructive to look back at how we got into this mess. Or is it a mess?
We weren’t alone, of course, with our blind eye back in 2012, with governments all over the world putting on the rose-coloured glasses as Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia’s 2007 San Francisco start-up shook the hotel industry to its core. It was only in 2016, when the company was valued at $US30 billion and the cities of Barcelona and New York launched the first court actions against the growing corporate giant that people beyond the accommodation industry itself began to realise that unregulated STA could take over towns and cities and ruin resident lifestyles.
By this time de-amalgamated Noosa had a new and somewhat reformist council, hampered only by the unpredictable voting patterns of a couple of councillors who were preoccupied by criminal matters or reality TV aspirations.
Mayor Tony Wellington could see the emerging bigger picture and wanted to instigate defensive action against the proliferation of STAs, and his councillors agreed, with the exception of Ingrid Jackson.
Buoyed by the level of support, Wellington took to the 2017 Local Government Association of Queensland annual conference a motion “That the Local Government Association of Queensland lobby the State Government seeking action to formulate a clear policy and response to the use of residential properties for short term accommodation where facilitated by on-line booking agencies including: Requiring the on-line booking agencies to provide Councils with property addresses so that they can help to ensure properties comply with appropriate planning schemes and rating requirements; Consideration of the long-term impact on local communities including the availability of rental accommodation stock, impact on housing affordability, impact on local amenity and potential impact on existing tourism properties.”
The motion succeeded by majority vote. The first shots in the STA wars had been fired.
As a result of the motion, immediately after the conference Kate Jones, the Minister for Innovation, Tourism Industry Development and the Commonwealth Games, established the Peer-to-Peer Economy and Short Term Letting Industry Reference Group, with Mayor Wellington invited to join, along with the mayor of Cairns, as the only two elected councillors in a wide-ranging group representing government tourism bodies and industry associations.
Tony Wellington recalled this week: “The group met on five occasions. We were working towards a proposal for the state government to consider legislation over the STA sector that would potentially include a code of conduct as well as data sharing that would force Airbnb, Stayz and others to provide information on their rental properties to relevant local governments. Of course, Airbnb pushed back hard against such measures, but the reference group generally agreed with Noosa Council’s position that such measures were necessary.
“The group was close to completing a position paper to include a code of conduct and data sharing that would have been provided to the Government for consideration. Meanwhile, I had been attending various conferences to discuss the STA issue and to debate with representatives from Stayz and Airbnb, such as the Disrupting the Housing Market conference run by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Unfortunately, at the 2020 elections, not only did I fail to be elected, but the state government also lost Kate Jones, and the reference group dissolved.”
Tony Wellington getting rolled by Clare Stewart in the mayoral election of March 2020 saw a new voting dynamic come into play, but the groundwork to control the STA market had already been planned if not executed.
Wellington told Noosa Today this week: “During my time in office, Noosa Council developed the current planning scheme. We considered what we could include in the scheme to help control the spread of STAs and came to understand that we could not make any imposts on existing STA properties through it. Two separate sets of legal advice from QCs declared that ‘existing use rights’ necessarily came into effect. These rights prevented Council from making any efforts via the scheme that would have had retrospective impact on existing STAs.
“However, after much argy-bargy with the State, we did institute some planning measures in the Noosa Plan that identified zones where any future STAs would require planning approval and thus areas where any new STAs could be discouraged. Noosa Council had commissioned an issues paper on the subject of STAs that was tabled in February 2019 and we also got legal advice regarding implementing new and novel local laws to regulate STA use – our own code of conduct laws. We had begun to draft a local law for STA conduct prior to the 2020 elections.”
Although it was certainly not always the case, on the major issues the 2020 council often voted on gender lines, with Mayor Stewart and councillors Amelia Lorentson and Karen Finzel on one side and experienced councillors Wilkie, Stockwell, Jurisevic and newbie Tom Wegener on the other. But such was not the case with the 5:2 adoption of the 2020 Noosa Plan, with only Stewart and Lorentson voting against it because of its STA regulatory provisions.
On 16 July 2020 Noosa Council adopted a new planning scheme, Noosa Plan 2020 which was gazetted and came into effect on 31 July 2020, replacing Noosa Plan 2006.
In October 2021 new rules and regulations for STA letting were introduced, to take effect from February 2022.
Former councillor-turned consultant Russell Green notified his RG Strategic client base: “As … these rules come into effect … a one-off Local Law application will need to be made for all existing and new properties operating short stay letting or home hosted accommodation unless identified as exempt … While the new scheme included new rules and new opportunities, council also announced they were preparing new STA laws which would impact operators. At that stage, no announcements were made about what these new rules and regulations would entail … Our concerns … were that these proposed rules were restrictive and imposed as a knee-jerk reaction to some particularly fervent submissions to the first round of public consultation.”
The stage was set for a big stink but as the calendar rolled into 2022 only one councillor had taken a stand against STA consistently since election, and that was first-termer Tom Wegener. He recalls: “Late in 2020 council voted to support the mayor’s declaration of a housing emergency. In January 2021, STA applications started coming before council, and Frank Wilkie agreed with me that STA and a housing crisis were diametrically opposed concepts. You couldn’t support both. Brian and Joe soon came on board too.
“I stated in a speech to council: ‘The reality is, as we continue to approve STAs in medium density, the amenity will be lost, precedents set, and the expectation of a predominantly residential neighbourhood will be turned to a tourist precinct.’
“By this time, the situation was out of control. More importantly, we were beginning to lose our residents.”
In Part 2 next week, a wide-ranging interview with Cr Tom Wegener, exploring his views on the way forward for short term letting in Noosa.
