Will this Melbourne Strata Building return to Serviced Apartments ?

There’s a lot of serviced apartment strata buildings where an accommodation operator runs an thier business using privately owned investment apartments. It’s the backbone of southeast Queensland holiday apartments and many well known brands like Accor, Quest and Crown operate that way.

But this 144 lot strata building in Melbourne’s CBD has an unusual history since:

• it was originally built and developed as a serviced apartment complex,

• Quest operated serviced apartments for many years,

• Quest stopped business there during COVID-19,

• some of the serviced apartments were then bought by owner occupiers, and

• some of the serviced apartments were bought by residential investors.

Now there’s a push by the investor owners to start operating a serviced apartment business in the building again with the Panache Hotel Group.

That’s created tension and disagreement between strata owners with a range of typical and less typical actions by and against them which you can read about in Adam Carey’s article in the Age CBD Residents Face Off with Investors over Push to Turn Homes into Hotel.

It’s a great example of the difficulty of balancing the desires of owner occupiers to live peacefully in their strata apartment homes and investor owners’ desire to improve the financial returns from their strata investments.

Since both strata owner groups are right and wrong to want those things; what should happen? And, will it?

Read the full article here.