Bessminda Groves is moving soon. Ever since she learned six months ago that she was likely to have to leave her current place, she has spent every day searching for somewhere new to live in Byron shire’s competitive rental market.
“This is just part of what you have to do,” Groves says. “I know how long it takes to get into another space. When having to look, I really feel like there’s a fire under my arse.”
According to the 2024 rental affordability index produced by National Shelter and SGS Economics and Planning, Byron Bay is one of the least affordable places to rent in the country, and surrounding towns across the shire on the New South Wales north coast are not much better.
The 28-year-old artist and cafe manager found herself caught in the region’s housing crisis three years ago when she moved from Sydney with her dog, Flea. She says trying to find somewhere to live in the area has been a blur of high rents, long queues and, sometimes, expensive bad memories.
“I just find it really hard as a young person with a pet trying to compete with people who have 20, 30 years of experience and income and who were born in a time where this wasn’t their reality,” she says.
Around the holiday period, she says, things get even harder as real estate listings thin.
“There’s nothing permanent that opens up this time of year – the people who own the houses, they can make money … through Airbnb.”
In September a council cap came into force, designed to prevent people offering properties across most of the shire as a short-term let for more than 60 days a year.
Asren Pugh, a councillor who was among those who worked to introduce the cap, says it is still too early to know what effect it has had.
“It’s going to take a while for the impact to be seen. Anecdotally I’ve heard of people changing their Airbnb into permanent rentals, but to what extent that’s happening, we’ll have to see,” Pugh says.
Whether the cap succeeds, he says, comes down to enforcement and scale.
“Most of the enforcement of this will be through data matching and having data come through online platforms like Airbnb and Stayz so they can be matched to calculate how many nights people are letting their properties out,” Pugh says. “It’s not feasible to do it in person.”
Pugh says the council does not have the resources to monitor the cap itself. The state government – which undertook an inquiry earlier this year into short-term holiday letting – is understood to be working with booking platforms to obtain the data needed but has argued enforcement ultimately lies with councils.
Cottage industry grew ‘out of control’
Chels Hood Withey from the campaign group House You says they have long held concerns about how the cap will be enforced, and believes there has been no significant change yet.
“We’ve still got the same number of properties on the holiday let sites and I’m still concerned about anti-social behaviour where landlords kick people out of the holiday period,” Hood Withey says.
Hood Withey says the cap is far from a silver bullet for the housing crisis in the area.
“People who have grown up here cannot buy a home, elderly people can’t pay off their mortgage … we see down at the public bathrooms, people are brushing their teeth and washing themselves before they take their children to school.
“When you don’t have homes, you don’t have nurses. You don’t have baristas. Teachers can’t live here. First Nations people are being pushed out. That’s not a functioning community.”
Michael Murray, a buyer’s agent and founding owner of Byron Property Search, moved to the area from Sydney nearly four decades ago and says that in the 1990s short-term holiday letting was viewed as a response to Byron Bay’s growing reputation as a party town. By attracting families, it was thought the community could reduce levels of anti-social behaviour.
But what began as a cottage industry grew “a little out of control”, he says, thanks to rising house prices and the advent of internet-based booking platforms such as Airbnb and Stayz. He says short-term letting does need regulation, but it was never the cause of the region’s housing issues.
“The people who were holiday letting permanently was always less than 10%,” he says.
“How is that going to solve the housing crisis?”
Murray believes the cap will stop more people attempting to buy properties purely to rent them as short-term holiday stays, but won’t help address issues with existing owners.
Anecdotally he has heard of some owners trying to find ways around the cap, or preferring to leave their property vacant as the land value rises – a practice he believes threatens what makes Byron Bay unique.
“Even if those houses do go back into the rental pool, they’re not going to be affordable houses,” Murrays says. “My idea of a well-functioning town is that we have a mixture of people, and we have affordable rentals so the artists and the musicians who make Byron special can live as part of the community.
“I’m very happy to fight back against a multinational … but by using short-term holiday letting as an issue, we failed to look at the reality that we just don’t want to build houses because we don’t want poor people here. And by not having poor people, we’re going to miss out on what makes Byron Bay special.”
Groves says she loves living in the area, but under current circumstances she feels she can never truly be part of it. She says she has been left feeling “shrivelled” – a sense shared by her friends, including one couple who resorted to buying a caravan for $30,000 just so they could at least own an asset.
“I already gave up on the idea of owning a home years and years ago,” she says.
“It’s absurd, but you cop it on the chin as it’s the reality of the situation right now.”
