Home invasion as MPs scupper holiday rental rights

It seems a sensible reform, letting flat owners have paid guests in their homes, has failed, scuttled by a handful of ‘liberal’ MPs.

From Cicero in ancient Rome to Blackstone in 18th century England, a man’s home was his castle.

Yet more recently property ownership has looked more like permission with conditions. A welter of environment and safety regulations, painstaking approvals processes, have chipped away at this timeless dictum, undermining owners’ rights to make reasonable use of their property as they see fit.

Last week I had to wait around for workmen to install child safety locks on my apartment’s windows to restrict their opening to a maximum of 12.5cm. In the same week I received a letter from the council asking if I objected to someone opening a cafe about 25 metres from my building.

Now I hear a sensible NSW government reform, to permit apartment owners to allow paid guests to stay in their homes, has failed, scuttled by a handful of ­“liberal” backbenchers.

Seriously, does this pass a cost-benefit test? It’s hard to see how limiting window openings by a further 8cm — pushing up everyone’s strata levies — will reduce the incidence of child deaths, especially in an inner-city block with no children. And why would anyone object to obviously beneficial use of an empty commercial lot for a cafe.

The state government’s inability to guarantee rights to “homeshare” — a bit of a misnomer, to be fair, as the motive is profit not sharing — is most concerning, though. First the NIMBYs, now the NIYBYs — not in your back yard.

Fair Trading Minister Matt Kean last month sensibly sought to clarify the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 to protect the property rights of strata lot owners. Section 139 says: “No by-law is capable of operating to prohibit or restrict the devolution of a lot or a transfer, lease, mortgage or other dealing relating to a lot.”

Where there’s a will there’s a way, though. John Sidoti, a Liberal backbencher, has advocated banning homesharing unless 75 per cent of owners vote to allow it. What happened to private rights? At the very least, the onus should be the reverse.

Surely it’s none of Mrs Bucket on the fifth floor’s business whether someone on the first wishes to have paying guests in their home.

The spectre of “party houses” has been overstated. How many travellers seek to make nuisances of themselves or destroy property, anyway? Last year Airbnb facilitated 49 million trips globally; only 0.04 per cent of them attracted any claim for property damage over $1000. A survey conducted for a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into short-stay accommodation in inner-city Melbourne found 1042 complaints arose from 1.173 million accommodation nights.

It would seem odd politics, too, given 4.8 million Australians use Airbnb — the biggest international homesharing service — and over 150,000 have listed dwellings, more than a third of them in NSW.

Typical hosts are earning about $5400 a year of extra income on average. That’s about 8 per cent of median earnings, providing some households with some extra cash in an era of meagre wage growth. Banning homesharing would reduce the value of apartments, too.

As ever, vocal, vested interests — in this case hotels, which fear a loss of revenue — are trying to pull the strings. Other Liberals who stalled Kean’s reforms have family connections in the real estate and hotel sectors.

The hotel industry already has plenty of help. West Australian taxpayers recently forked out $2 million to fund a campaign to fill privately owned Perth hotel rooms. Crowing about a $3bn investment in new rooms in late 2016, WA Hotels Association boss said: “Perth and Fremantle’s hotel industry is preparing WA for the growth we expect in tourism visitor numbers over the next decade.”

Seven months later: “We’ve had an enormous increase in room capacity without a corresponding increase in leisure and event visitation.” So much for taking risks with the rewards.

South Australia and Tasmania, most in need of tourism to boost their economies, have taken the most relaxed approach to homesharing, requiring only large-scale commercial operators to register. Queensland, in keeping with its distaste for ride-sharing app Uber, is currently talking to hotels about how best to regulate homesharing.

It’s worth questioning the ­effectiveness of regulation anyway. Sydney is already in the top 10 cities worldwide for Airbnb, based on the number of listings. Would banning it stop homesharing, or put up the cost as hosts factored in the chance of being caught?

In late 2016 New York City banned transient rentals of less than 30 days in apartment blocks where the owner isn’t present. Last November I stayed in three New York Airbnbs without any difficulty, and the owners weren’t present.

Firms such as Uber and Airbnb, including Australia’s homegrown AirTasker, in the vanguard of digital commerce, have shown humans are quite capable of mutually beneficial interactions without a prying bureaucracy.

Quite aside from the rights of owners, homesharing provides wider benefits. Using existing assets more intensively improves the efficiency of the economy’s stock of dwellings. Extra competition means lower prices which mean extra visitors, who will have more money to spend on other things.

Neither Cicero nor Blackstone had to deal with rowdy Airbnb guests, but it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t have thought the off chance of a noisy neighbour would warrant dictating what owners can do at home.