Charles Wooley: Is Dodges Ferry at risk of becoming the new Byron?

The arrival of a new Airbnb run by an ‘influencer’ has prompted Charles Wooley to ponder if this Tassie seaside gem will soon become the next Byron Bay.

ADVERTISED online as “Casa De Flex: A Boutique Beachside Dreamscape”, this property will cause a stir where I live. If it works others will want to get in on the act.

The four-guest, two-bedroom holiday home at Dodges Ferry is yours for five nights at $2050, Including a cleaning fee of $150 and Airbnb service fee of $341.65.

Locals were amazed two years ago when a run-down, two-bedroom knockdown sold to a mainlander for more than a million dollars. But that was on the beach.

This week’s extravagant rental is a little inland and hardly beachside as claimed. But the building is a well-restored 1970s classic and the decor is striking, if a little psychedelically lurid.

You can judge from the pictures online, but I am thinking northern NSW up-market hippy cool. In which case I am wondering, is Byron Bay coming to Dodge City (as I like to call it) and will the Sheriff have to run those Airbnb bandits out of town?

Airbnb Casa De Flex in Dodges Ferry, with its well-restored 1970s classic decor, has a certain northern NSW hippy cool vibe to it, according to Charles Wooley.

From Dodges Ferry all the way up Tassie’s East Coast to Swansea and St Helens we are

asking, like Hamlet: “To Airbnb, or not to Airbnb? That is the question.”

About a 30-minute drive from Hobart airport, my patch, Dodges Ferry, and Sorell’s beautiful southern beaches are largely undiscovered spots for a great Tasmanian East Coast getaway. Why suffer the traffic jams on the road to Coles Bay when Carlton Beach is less than an hour from the capital?

But before I get myself run out of town, let me hasten to say that I am only musing and not really promoting Dodges Ferry as an Airbnb destination (even if it is inevitable.)

I live there and whenever I enthuse about Carlton Beach and its surrounds the locals tell me sternly: “Charlie, we like that you love the place, but so do we. Now will you just please shut up about it.”

Dodges Ferry, not far from Hobart, Tasmania, is picturesque. Storey Realty

They like the place just like it is, while the unhappy residents of Byron Bay, in northern NSW, like their place the way it was. Byron Bay used to be one of my favourite places on the eastern seaboard of Australia, but in the immortally mangled words of Yankees baseball legend Yogi Berra, when once talking about a New York watering hole: “It’s now gotten so popular, hardly anyone goes there.”

Admittedly he mightn’t be an authority, having also pronounced: “When it comes to a fork in the road, take it.”

He also created the unforgettable Berra-ism disclaimer: “I never said most of the things I said.”

(After a lifetime in journalism that’s the one I love best.)

Still, I think Berra’s notion is spot-on; that a place can become so popular that it cooks the golden-egg-laying goose.

One of the bedrooms in the hip and cool Airbnb Casa De Flex, at Dodges Ferry.

A few years ago, in the wonderful Spanish city of Barcelona, with a population of less than two million, I saw how that town was struggling under the weight of 27 million visitors every year. Popular spots had become no-go areas for the locals, and 5000 renters had become homeless.

The widespread tensions of what has been called “over-tourism” led Ada Colau, Barcelona’s popular female mayor (the first ever), to declare that the local authorities should always rule “for people who live here rather than for people who don’t”.

Not a bad maxim, I would think, for anywhere.

In Byron Bay the council estimates that 40 per cent of rental stock is now used for short-term visitor accommodation.

Mayor Michael Lyon says: “Nowhere in the world has that kind of short-term letting as a proportion of total rental stock.”

Investors, some of them out-of-towners, have bought properties, converting them to more profitable holiday rentals.

With the holiday destination of Byron Bay becoming so popular, the subsequent rise in Airbnbs in the shire has caused a lack of accommodation, as well as a decline in liveability, for permanent residents. Picture: Getty Images.

Homelessness and displacement of permanent renters have created a shortage in the workforce, as has also been reported in towns on Tasmania’s East Coast.

Byron Shire is almost exactly the same area as Sorell, just over 500 square kilometres, but with twice the permanent population of 36,000 people.

What separates the mangrove jack from the flathead is this decisive statistic: in 2021-22 Byron got more than two million domestic and international visitors.

Tasmania as a whole, not including cruise ships, recorded 966,500 visitors.

Tassie ain’t seen nothing yet, but forewarned might be forearmed.

Last year the Byron council moved to reduce the number of days available for short-term rentals from 180 to 90 days per year, the reasoning being that halving the landlord’s income should make it more attractive to rent their investment properties to full-time tenants.

Some Hobart City councillors have argued for similar controls, so far without success.

No matter how good the motives, for most property owners it does create a sense of unease when bureaucracy seeks to tell them what they can and can’t do with real estate they have already paid considerable taxes and duties, along with the purchase.

Byron Bay is one of the most popular whale watching tourist destinations on the east coast of Australia. Picture: Istock

But I can say (with some authority) that council intervention has not been actively considered in my most pleasant and peaceful shire of beaches, vineyards, distilleries and oysters.

In Byron, however, the bid to control short-term lets was popular with everyone but property investors.

Late last year the shire council was set to implement the restrictions, but the NSW state government moved to prevent any regulation the day before the council was due to vote.

A government consultation and hearing into the issue is now under way. Don’t hold your breath.

Across all Australian legislatures, federal and state, it seems that about half of all members of parliament are property investors.

We can assume a proportion of those are in the lucrative business of holiday lets. And just like foreign policy the issue is amicably bipartisan, because how else can folk earning more than $200,000 on the public payroll reduce their tax other than by taking advantage of Australia’s generous negative gearing laws?

Nothing to see here.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian journalist and deputy mayor of Sorell Council.