A Tale of two cities: Attempts to regulate Airbnb occupants in strata schemes in Sydney and Melbourne

The trend to short term letting of part or the whole of houses and apartment as part of the new sharing economy has presented new challenges for property owners and governments. Property owners are successfully using existing contractual or legal rights to extract remedies for unsanctioned behaviour by tenants, as exemplified by the recent New Zealand decision in Nice Place Property Management Limited v Jeff Walter Paterson [2018] NZTT 4115779 and 4114640, where a claim for profits made by the tenant using Airbnb to sublet without consent was successful. Governments are, on the contrary, finding the task of achieving a regulatory balance between property owners and their neighbours, particularly in a strata scheme, more challenging. The different approaches to the problem in Victoria and New South Wales is compared and contrasted.