Tathra Wharf in the Bega Valley Shire,one of several LGAs that had 10-15 per cent of dwellings vacant.Credit:Alamy
She said Labor would revisit the planning controls allowing short-term lettings up to 180 days a year if it won next year’s state election,though it would be careful not to destroy the tourism economy in holiday towns.
Grattan Institute economic policy program director Brendan Coates said restricting holiday lettings would come at a cost. “You might get a roof over your head but is there a risk you’d lose your job?”
Professor Nicole Gurran at the University of Sydney said there had always been holiday homes on the South Coast and North Coast. Platforms such as Airbnb were not the underlying cause but the current short-term rental accommodation policy did not strike the right balance,she said.
“A motel would be lucky,probably,to be occupied for 180 nights a year. That’s more than every weekend,” Gurran said.
She also said governments should be able to temporarily access empty properties during a disaster,such as bushfires or flooding.
Dr Peter Tulip,chief economist at libertarian think tank the Centre for Independent Studies,said platforms such as Airbnb helped make use of vacant houses and therefore should be encouraged,not restricted.
“If owners want to leave their house empty,it may not seem like the most efficient use of their asset,but it’s their choice,” Tulip said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Planning and Environment said the planning system could not dictate how people used their properties,and the government’s focus was on supply.
Victoria has a special tax on unoccupied dwellings,a policy that Coates said “sounded good but didn’t make much difference in practice” since it had carve-outs to allow both holiday homes and city pads for country residents.
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A spokeswoman for NSW Treasurer Matt Kean said the NSW government doubled the Foreign Investor Surcharge land tax to 4 per cent in the most recent state budget,which would help to the extent that foreign investors were holding vacant properties.
But she pointed out the trend in the share of unoccupied properties has remained broadly unchanged over the past 25 years,based on census data back to 1996.
There were big swings at LGA level but Kishan Ratnam,a senior associate and partner at SGS Economics&Planning,pinned this on the lockdown and international border closure. He said inner city areas were affected by reduced numbers of international students,while local workers retreated to the suburbs and regions seeking space.
The City of Sydney had 18,733 unoccupied homes on census night,which was in August last year at the height of the hard Delta lockdown. This meant 15.2 per cent of the housing stock was vacant,a 4.7 percentage point rise since 2016.
Other Sydney LGAs had a rise of 2-3 percentage points in the proportion of empty homes compared with 2016,including the LGAs of the Inner West,Strathfield,Parramatta,Ryde,North Sydney,Woollahra,and Randwick.
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The trend had now reversed,with “more recent data showing vacancy rates are dropping quite steeply,and rents are increasing in the central city areas,” Ratnam said.
Meanwhile,outback LGAs such as Bourke and Cobar also had a high proportion of unoccupied homes,probably because the areas declined in population.
The census has not collected data on why dwellings were unoccupied since 1986. At that time,a quarter of the vacant homes across Australia were holiday homes and 35 per cent simply had the resident absent on census night. Other reasons included homes for sale or between tenancies,newly constructed properties,and renovations.