Election 2022 (Poll added)

[LP]

Good examples are complex, but take some small country towns.  City folk like the area, so they buy another property in the town.  The house either stays as a holiday home or short stay accommodation.  It removes a permanent population from the town.

This reminds me, I'd heard about a scheme OS that taxed vacant properties at a higher rate as a way to overcome the housing shortage. It's happening OS already, here we have gone part way by requiring major hotels and other venues to provided unused rooms as emergency accommodation, similar to the US. But I wonder how things would go in the housing market if "property collectors" were encouraged / forced to put residents in place to save tax dollars. I'm sure there would be an outcry, but even so I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

To me it's analogous the fringe benefits tax of company vehicles, some people have a garages full of registered cars that hardly ever hit the road. Maybe the rego fees are back to front, and if you can afford to keep a garage full of unused vehicles you should pay a higher rate rather than get a discount for reduced use!

Think along the same lines for properties, particularly all these foreign owned vacant houses that seem to proliferate in certain suburbs. I never realised this was a problem until a mate got in on the gig of maintaining them, he tells me in some suburbs there are literally whole streets that are door to door immaculately maintained vacant properties. They have to go in, garden, clean gutters, clean houses, open windows, dust, vacuum and run the services like gas or water to fill traps, flush toilets, etc., etc., then send photographic reports to some agent or foreign buyer. Basically he said he making a killing flushing toilets in empty properties!