Flat Chat Wrap #37 - Defects loans, Airbnb rules and sex in the spa

It’s a real mixed bag in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast – finance, Airbnb and sneaky sex.

Sue Williams and I start our dissection of the week’s strata news by looking at the suggestion that people suffering under building defects might get low-interest or even no-interest loads from the government.

We reckon it’s better than nothing but it’s not enough.  Anyone who has ever suffered through the agonies of realising you have defects in your building, then having to fight your developer to get them fixed - if you can even find them before they phoenix into a puff of smoke – and then face raising the cash because the only people legally obliged to fix defects, regardless of who’s to blame for them, are the apartment owners.

We reckon, apart from the developers and builders,  the people who have contributed most to the problem and benefitted most from it, are our successive governments, Labour and Liberal, who have become addicted to the revenue from building booms to the point where they have spld apartment owners down the river.

So come on. Forget all this loans nonsense and compensate us for all the grief you’ve either caused or enabled.   There’s more on this HERE.

Next cab off the rank is the government’s discussion paper on Airbnb-style holiday lets.

As you will read in my Australian Financial Review column this weekend (posted here a couple of days later, Stayz has welcomed one of the proposals while Airbnb is decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

There’s a mandatory code of conduct and an industry-managed registry of holiday lets (why does that fill me with a sense of cynical dread?) plus extraordinarily strict fire regulations which we think with do more to curb short-term holiday lets than the other two combined. Again, there’s also more on that HERE.

And finally, Sue brings a tale of what happened when a fried spotted a couple having sex in the complex’s communal spa pool.  Think that sound a bit weird, wait till you hear who they were!

And to think Airbnb fights holiday let registers on the grounds of privacy! It’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.