18 October 2024 minor release summary

Short-term Rental Accommodation 

The following enhancements have been made to support the introduction of the revised day-cap for properties within the Byron Bay local government area:

• The non-hosted day capacity limit for designated areas within Byron Bay local government area has been reduced to 60 days. 
• Existing notifications have been updated to include the relevant day cap for STRA properties. 

The following enhancements have been made to the STRA service to address user feedback and improve the user experience:

• When registering a multi-dwelling, manor house or residential flat, the apartment or unit number will need to be entered by the STRA registrant if the address selected does not contain the apartment or unit number. This improves usability and accuracy of application information.
• ‘Unit No.’ field has been added to the property address field within STRA email notifications. This will ensure that the complete property address is included in all relevant notifications. 
• The owner will receive renewal reminders when the owner and registrant are not the same person. This change has been introduced to minimise properties not being renewed by the due date when the registrant is not available / no longer the registrant but the system has not been updated with the new information.
• Registrants can de-register their active STRA properties, even when there are future bookings for that property. This removes the need for an applicant to contact the customer support team. 

Bugs and fixes

The following minor fixes have been made to address known technical issues: 

• Controlled activities approvals (CAA) service to include additional reporting fields for enhanced reporting for the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment & Water.  
• The broken link to the NSW Planning Portal login page within some system generated notification emails for development application and concurrence and referral services has been corrected. This will ensure that applicants are directed to the correct login screen. 
• Alert is displayed when council user does not select a document to be published in the ‘Request Publication’ screen within the Publish on Portal service. This will prevent a user from completing the process without uploading a document.
• Duplicates of the same link on the Planning Panel register are no longer visible, which will improve the user experience.
• A council user will be able to complete the preliminary assessment of a modification to a development application, even if the original PAN number is not accurate. 

Application Programming Interface (API)  

Some housekeeping updates have been made to the Application Program Interface (APIs). There is no urgency for councils using these APIs to implement these changes, they could be included in your next scheduled API upgrade. The changes are:

• Between 24 March and 16 October 2024, the default value ‘Climate zone 8’ was being included in the API. This has been removed and councils using the ‘Online DA v2 API’ and ‘Online State DA v1API’ will no longer receive climate zone information.
• Data type for attribute ‘additionalInformation’ in the Common V1 API has been updated from ‘array of string’ to ‘string’. 
• The cause of the ‘Internal service error’ preventing the completion of the ‘AcceptReturn’ and ‘Assessment’ operations in the Online Post-consent certificate service v1 API has been addressed.

View the technical specifications for the APIs for online services .

Support materials

The following step-by-step guides have been updated: 

These updated documents can be found on the Applicant Resources page of the NSW Planning Portal.