Queenstown rentals pinged by audit
Almost 800 Queenstown Lakes District property owners offering holiday home accommodation are about to get the hard word from their district council and could face significant rates rises.
Owners advertising short-term rental accommodation online, but paying residential rates on their properties, have been pinged in an audit by the Queenstown Lakes District Council.
It is sending letters to 792 owners reminding them they need to register their properties as visitor accommodation, apply for resource consent, or stop advertising for short-term rentals.
Chief financial officer Stewart Burns said this also applied to tenants sub-letting rooms in a house to visitors without the landlord’s knowledge.
Homeowners in the Queenstown Lakes area can do one holiday let per year of up to 28 days without it affecting their rates.
But properties reclassified as visitor accommodation for doing multiple lets faced paying about 25 per cent more in rates from July 1.
Standalone homes rented out as visitor accommodation for more than 90 nights a year also require resource consent, as do multi-unit homes doing any holiday rentals.
Registered holiday homes and homestays had to keep letting records, meet certain fire safety standards, provide on-site car parking, and ensure there were no more than two adults per bedroom.
A two-year amnesty to encourage property owners to register their properties appropriately on the rates database had seen total visitor accommodation registrations rise to between 700 and 800, Burns said.
A conviction for failing to comply with the rules under the Resource Management Act carried a maximum penalty of a $300,000 fine and two years’ imprisonment.
No-one had been prosecuted to date, Burns said, because the council preferred to educate owners instead.
Some had tried to evade the audit by not including a physical address in their advertisements but the council used its mapping technology to identify them.
‘‘There’s still a considerable amount that are not complying at this stage,’’ Burns said.
Airbnb lists more than 1000 rentals for Queenstown, Wanaka, Arrowtown and Lake Hayes, and the online service has been blamed for a lack of affordable rental housing for workers.
Commercial accommodation providers have also complained that some Airbnb operators benefited from tourism promotions they did not help pay for through rates.
Burns said the crackdown was not a revenue-gathering exercise as the council had already set its budget, but it would help allot rates more fairly.