FLAT CHAT WRAP

Finally, the mainstream media is not buying the Airbnb BS.  Have a listen to the the $30 billion global letting agency's talking head Brent Thomas squirm as ABC Melbourne's Jon Faine nails them on their failure to pay tax in Australia."If I was the Premier, I would refuse to meet you," has to be the quote of the year.LISTEN TO IT HEREMeanwhile, in the Flat Chat column currently running online in the AFR I refer to having "previous convictions".  If you want to read the whole charge sheet, laying out my research, findings and opinions on Airbnb, start HERE.It's interesting that other branches of the media are becoming a bit sceptical of Airbnb's dubious and relentlessly repeated message that they are all about ordinary people letting rooms in their homes (while they are fighting tooth and nail to force apartment blocks to accept short-term lets of whole apartments, their main source of income).Now News Ltd journalists are faithfully trotting out any statistics from Airbnb-paid "surveys" as if they are fact.  But it's just a matter of time.  Wait till News realises that Clover Moore (bless her organic fair-trade cotton socks) is pro-Airbnb ... then the worm will turn.Personally, my views on Airbnb have evolved over the past few years.  I have gone from being largely pro the idea of legitimate sharing to very anti the TRUE intent of Airbnb which is to force us to accept holiday lets in our homes and force us to share our facilities with complete strangers over whom we and the hosts have no control.We have planning laws that were evolved over many years precisely to spare communities from this kind of exploitation.  I bought an apartment in a residential-only building. If the government wants to change its status to "de facto hotel", just to appear trendy and pour money into private investors' pockets, they can expect a much bigger backlash that the vague pathetic threats issued recently by the Airbnb attack poodles.Dammit, I might run for parliament myself.  Now THAT is a threat to democracy! 

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

Does Jimmy really hate Airbnb.  No, he says - in fact, he has a confession to make about his trip to Vietnam.And you can read about plans for his next trip next year, right HERE

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

We chat about the heated exchanges on the Flat Chat Forum regarding whether or not your committee should discuss anything except what's going on in the building - and we find another listener whose neighbour has dug a cellar under her unit.  Honest! 

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

The government releases its discussion document on short-term holiday letting.  JimmyT and James V discuss

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

Jimmy, James and callers discuss inflammable cladding - who pays and why it's scarier than you thought.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

The government seems to have backtracked on short-term letting - Jimmy tells James Valentine why he's the only person who spotted the shift in attitudes.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

If you are as tired of reading about Airbnb as I am of writing about them you won’t get past the end of this sentence.However, this week I was on the James Valentine show on ABC radio doing my usual Q&A on apartment living and we needed to talk about the recent Government decision NOT to give the Coure report on holiday letting its unqualified support.Predictably, we had no sooner finished taking a call – from a listener whose tenants had illegally sub-let their apartment on Airbnb with disastrous results  - than we got a text from a listener.You can hear the Flat Chat spot on Afternoons with James Valentine HERE.Whoever they were,  they certainly had the official Airbnb party line off pat. Badly behaved guests would be given bad ratings on the website, said the text.  Also, it continued, the majority of apartment owners want the right to do what they want with their homes.Ignoring the highly dubious effect of voluntary “ratings”, I have two problems with that last point.Firstly, we trade off the right to do exactly what we want with our homes when we agree to live in a place where we share the cost of cleaners, security, gardening, repairs and maintenance.We also share walls, ceilings, floors, lifts, front doors, hallways and car parks.  Why anyone with a brain  would think that is the same as owning a house in a quarter-acre block is beyond me.Also, the NSW government punched some very large holes in the “my home is my castle” myth in the new strata laws, not least in that 75 percent of owners can force the other 25 percent to sell their apartments to developers.But here’s another thing: if the majority of people want the “right” to do as they please with their units, why oppose a law that would require the support of 75 percent of owners to lock out holiday lets?To put it another way, even if only 25 percent of owners – rather than the purported majority – are in favour of holiday lets, then by-laws banning them will never pass.I rest my case.One thing that never rests is the constant flow of odd and interesting question that come through the Flat Chat Forum. here's just a sample of this week's brain teasers: I thought I was getting a car park but it turns out to be a storage space and the strata manager says I can’t park my car in it. That’s HERE. The strata manager says there needs to be a strata committee-only EGM before I can do my renovations. Is that right? That’s HERE. Chairman is using “executive” powers to decide of common property maintenance. Is he allowed to do that? That’s HERE. Fair Trading mediation may be compulsory and free but is it worth the effort? That’s HERE. Drying laundry on the balcony – what exactly does “visible from outside the building” mean? That’s HERE. Is it OK for the committee to use an online survey to decide on changes they want to propose? That’s HERE.By the time you read this there will be a heap of other questions and answers on the Flat Chat forum. Come on by and join in.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

Actually, that heading is a bit misleading, if not wildly hopeful.  The NSW government is due any day to table its response to the Coure inquiry into holiday letting, the most prominent manifestation of which is Airbnb.This morning Radio National ran a track about the proposed laws in which yours truly was quoted extensively.  Click on that link to listen.But of course this will not be the last word on the issue.   Far from it. Parliament will have to discuss it and MPS will vote on it and, if recent history is anything to go by, Airbnb will pump millions into the advertising market to shore up their image of a friendly hug-fest that helps nice people to do nice things.I saw a poster in the station the other day claiming that Airbnb helped some woman to pay her strata fees.  Nice for her - but who pays for the extra wear and tear from all the woman's visitors who neither know nor care about by-laws and building rules?Grrrr!Anyway, in the absence of a recent turn on James Valentine, you can hear me and some people who actually know what they're talking about on Radio National.Oh, and I'm betting here and now that my prediction that the law proposed tomorrow (Wednesday April 19) will allow room lets but restrict whole apartment lets will be proved wrong.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

I was in at the ABC doing my strata spot with James Valentine the other day and the question of monster trucks and the increasing squeeze in apartment block car parks came up.We wrote about that here a few weeks ago but it makes you think that Australia’s love affair with large 4WDs and the fact that half of us will be living in apartments in the next 10 years will reach some sort of crisis point soon.A friend of mine lives in a town house complex where two tradies use their garages as workshops and for storage and use visitor parking permanently for their utes.Recently her mother visited, parked in visitor parking and came back to her vehicle to find an obscene note plastered on her windscreen telling her that if she parked on “my” space again, her car would be trashed.Do these people not get it or do they know exactly what they’re doing but have decided the by-laws are stupid and they obviously shouldn’t apply to them.It’s times like this you wish there really was such a thing as StrataKops.You can listen to the James valentine session HERE. And when you’ve done that, dive into the problems  and solutions parked in the Flat Chat Forum. What do you do when your upstairs neighbours have complied with the by-law for timber floors … but you can hear every footstep? That’s HERE. Should the owners be expected to pay when the strata committee meetings have food and drink supplied? That’s HERE. The woman next door get her dog to poo and pee every day on the lawn outside my window. What can I do?  That’s HERE. A power-crazed, rusted-on chairman is calling illegal meetings, not informing concerned owners and charging private renovations to the strata funds. What can you do?  That’s HERE. An Airbnb host explains why he thinks Airbnb is being less than honest with the people from whom it makes its money. That’s HERE (scroll to the end). PICA Group strata managers explain why they charge for updating their systems in line with new laws (but other managers don’t). That’s HERE. Can the strata committee use strata insurance to pay for legal advice regarding a case against us at the Tribunal? That’s HERE.All these and a lot more in the Forum and every Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

You’re always hesitant in this game to claim that you have a regular slot, anywhere, doing anything.  Or you should be - it's usually a guaranteed precursor to getting the hook.But I guess after almost 10 years of guesting on James Valentine’s Afternoons on ABC radio, I can say that, yes, I do get an occasional 25 minutes of radio fame.So, for those of you who miss it, I am now posting podcasts or, as those of us who can remember when radios had valves call them, "recordings" of these and other radio spots.I’m on with James again at 2.00pm on Monday, March 13.  But if you can’t wait till then, click in the link above to hear last month’s episode when we discussed new strata laws, proxy farming, StrataKops and Airbnb (yawn).And, of course, took a few calls from listeners and tried not to panic when they asked tricky questions.Enjoy. And if you have any technical issues hearing this, email us and we'll try to help (but we're not promising anything).

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.