‘The most horrendous thing’: Homeowner’s nightmare after hoarder hell
A woman whose house was trashed by her tenant is now being slammed by locals and even some on the council over her latest move.
A scorned landlord is hoping to secure a short-stay permit after her North Hobart property was trashed by an unruly tenant last year.
What confronted Kim Woodcock when she inspected her property after her tenant took off without notice last August left a bitter taste in her mouth.
So much so she has applied for a short-stay accommodation permit through Hobart City Council – which will allow her to offer her house to holiday-makers and the like on platforms like Airbnb or Stayz.
“It was just staggering when I opened the door. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it,” she told The Mercury last year.
“Just the stench permeated everything.
“There were empty cat food cans everywhere, drink bottles, shopping bags, Uber Eats bags and then just cardboard boxes, I haven’t even looked to see what’s in them.
“[There was] cat mess over everything as well.”
Photos showed the house covered in ankle-deep rubbish, rotten food and mould.
“[It] was the first chance I had to go in, expecting it to not be 100 per cent clean,” Ms Woodcock said.
“I went straight down to Woolies and bought some big rubber gloves, it was overwhelming.
“This chap had been here for a while, and I’d bent over backwards to help him out in hard situations.
“It’s just to infuriating that you do try and do the right thing and help somebody out and then you just get kicked in the teeth.”
Seven months on, Ms Woodcock is now seeking to turn the home into short-stay accommodation.
The trashed property was among a row of six terrace houses she owns for which she has made permit applications.
She claims the applications are to give herself “options” and the dwellings may not necessarily be used for that purpose.
In her application, she stated the trashed home and two others sit empty while undergoing renovations.
She says tenants in the other three are considering leaving when their leases end “due to rents being too high”.
Prospective tenants and some on the Hobart City Council slammed the landlord’s application, saying it contributed to the city’s rental crisis.
But newly elected Hobart City councillor Louise Elliot, who ran partly on a platform of homeowners advocacy, said Ms Woodcock’s decision to consider the short-stay option for her property made sense.
She experienced first-hand the atrocious state of Ms Woodcock’s home.
“It was the most horrendous thing,” she told news.com.au.
“You could smell it from the street. There was rot and rodents – that’s heartbreak.
“Most tenants do the right thing. Sadly, a portion of tenants also show no respect. That’s really expensive.
“The thing about a short stay is that you get to look after your property a lot more.
“I mean, Kim went through a nightmare experience. My understanding is it cost about $34,000 to clean that up.”
She believes many in the Tasmanian capital are quick to place the blame for the localised housing crisis on owners of short-stay accommodation, but she says efforts for freeing up rentals should be focused elsewhere.
Cr Elliot said other potential solutions should include “more social housing, cutting red tape in planning and quicker options”.
“Last council meeting, I put in a motion saying let’s incentivise people to rent out the empty bedrooms,” she said.
“Because across Australia, every night, there are millions of empty bedrooms.
“And obviously, thousands of those would be in Hobart.
“The council sadly voted that down.”
Hobart’s rental market is among the most squeezed in the country.
According to the February 2023 PropTrack rental vacancy rates report, Hobart’s rental vacancy rates increased by 0.06 percentage points but remained 31 per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels.
The current vacancy rate for Hobart is 1.28 per cent.
The report also showed a 31 per cent decline in vacancy rates since March 2020.
In 2022, the Hobart City Council passed the first stage of a ban on new whole-home, short-stay accommodation in the inner-city area.
It is understood the proposal is undergoing public consultation, with a final approval needing to be signed off by the Tasmanian Planning Commission.
“People assume incorrectly that permit equals house off the rental market, and a ‘whole house’ on Airbnb would have been rental stock. That’s just not true,” Cr Elliot said.
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