Hundreds of short-term rental accommodation (STRA) owners in the Byron Shire are ‘blatantly rorting’ the system by falsely claiming they are not required to register their properties, Byron Council has been told.
In a stinging submission during last week’s Council meeting, Victims of Holiday Letting (VOHL) spokesperson, David Wallace, produced figures showing that more than 500 owners of holiday lets in the Shire had listed their properties as ‘exempt from registration’ on the Airbnb website.
This meant that they could effectively avoid complying with both the state government’s short-term rental regulations and, crucially, the 60-day cap on holiday letting that applies across most of the Byron Shire.
‘The March 11 data from [website] Inside Airbnb states that 507 short-term rentals in the Byron Shire claimed exemption from registration,’ Mr Wallace said.
‘This represents 20 per cent of Airbnb listings for the Shire.
‘Further, there has been a 25 per cent increase in exempt listing in the last three months.
‘This is illegal and blatant rorting.
‘It’s only those with an approved DA for visitor and tourist accommodation who are exempt, and only a handful of these advertise on Airbnb.’
Mr Wallace said that the AirBnB booking engine was aiding and abetting this rorting by accepting the exemption claims of STRA owners without undertaking any checks as to their validity.
No evidence required
‘Airbnb is clearly requiring no evidence for exemption,’ he said.
‘This is despite the fact that, under the STRA code of conduct, it is an offence for a booking engine to advertise a STRA without a registration number, and penalties apply under the Fair Trading Act.
Mr Wallace said, ‘Council should lobby the ministers for fair trading and planning to resolve this blatant rorting.’
The Echo contacted Airbnb around the claims but did not hear back by deadline.
The rorting claims raise further questions about the effectiveness of Byron 60-day cap on short-term holiday letting as a method for addressing the rental crisis in the Shire.
The cap, which came into effect for most of the Shire’s non-hosted holiday rentals last September, was intended to disincentivise short-term holiday letting, and thus drive the owners to list their properties on the long-term market.
It applies across all of the Shire, except for two precincts in Byron Bay and Brunswick Heads, where un-hosted holiday letting is allowed 365 days of the year.
While the year-long rollout of the cap is not yet complete, there is little evidence to suggest that any headway has been made at this stage.
Australia’s peak short-term rental accommodation industry group, ASTRA, released a report in February which found that 95 per cent of short-term rental owners surveyed said they would ‘not move their properties into the rental market’.
However, it has been suggested that the findings of this report were not reliable because they were not based on rigorous methodology.
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