City of Albany waiting to take its lead from State Government on short-term accommodation regulations

The City of Albany is likely to wait for further details about how the State Government plans to reform and regulate the short-term accommodation sector before it addresses its own approach, according to Mayor Dennis Wellington. He told the Advertiser the idea of trying to impact the number of short-term accommodation offerings in the City to bolster the number of homes available for residents had not been raised by the council at this point. “Obviously people are looking at it around the country because everyone is having the same sort of problem, but we haven’t raised it as a possibility at this stage” he said. Online database Inside Airbnb indicates there are 382 listings on the leading STA providers within the City of Albany and of those 220 had been reviewed in the past six months and had an estimated to be booked for more than 60 nights a year. Entire home or apartment listings account for almost 85 per cent of listings, and more than 90 per cent of the recent and frequently active listings. Several local governments across Australia have been taking different approaches in efforts to impact the prevalence of short-stay accommodation offerings in their areas. Landowners in the Shire of Denmark are among those that asked to pay higher rates if their property is used for the purpose of holidays. “There are certainly a lot of different approaches being taken across the country and we’ve just been keeping an eye on it to see what other people do and what benefits it might have,” Mr Wellington said. “I haven’t seen anything that works dramatically yet, but it’s something of interest that we’ll keep following.” He said the State Government, which raised the issue of reforming the STA sector as early as 2018, should be taking the lead regarding possible changes and the City was waiting to see what happened in that space. A parliamentary inquiry into short-stay accommodation was conducted by the Economics and Industry Standing Committee started in November 2018 and ended in September 2019 when it tabled its Levelling the Playing Field report. It took until December 2021 for the Government to produce its draft position statement on the issue and there has been little work done publicly on the matter since. Minutes of the WA Planning Commission’s May meeting indicate a final position statement was due to be discussed, but the details of the statement remain confidential. A spokesperson for the State Government said work continues “towards the establishment of a Statewide Registration Scheme” and that “the Planning for Tourism Position Statement and associated guidelines” are being finalised. Mr Wellington said there were many different ways that local governments and the State Government could work together to combat the housing crisis. “There are many solutions, it’s a matter of which one will be the best to have some immediate impact,” he said. He said he did not believe it was the City’s role “at this stage” to influence how people used their houses, but that “depends how much more of a problem it could become”. At its December meeting, Albany’s council voted against implementing a planning policy that would have required any proposed STA outside of a certain area to go through an approval process before they started operating. At the time councillors suggested a revised policy could be brought back to them at a later date, but that has yet to happen.