FLAT CHAT WRAP

Jimmy, James and callers discuss inflammable cladding - who pays and why it's scarier than you thought. ____________________________________________________ Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia. Find us on Facebook   and Twitter and the Flat Chat website. Send comments and questions to mail@flatchat.com.au. Register to ask and answer questions about apartment livin...

The government seems to have backtracked on short-term letting - Jimmy tells James Valentine why he's the only person who spotted the shift in attitudes. ____________________________________________________ Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia. Find us on Facebook   and Twitter and the Flat Chat website. Send comments and questions to mail@flatchat.com.au. Register...

If you are as tired of reading about Airbnb as I am of writing about them you won’t get past the end of this sentence. However, this week I was on the James Valentine show on ABC radio doing my usual Q&A on apartment living and we needed to talk about the recent Government decision NOT to give the Coure report on holiday letting its unqualified support. Predictably, we had no sooner finished t...

Actually, that heading is a bit misleading, if not wildly hopeful.  The NSW government is due any day to table its response to the Coure inquiry into holiday letting, the most prominent manifestation of which is Airbnb. This morning Radio National ran a track about the proposed laws in which yours truly was quoted extensively.  Click on that link to listen. But of course this will not be the last...

I was in at the ABC doing my strata spot with James Valentine the other day and the question of monster trucks and the increasing squeeze in apartment block car parks came up. We wrote about that here a few weeks ago but it makes you think that Australia’s love affair with large 4WDs and the fact that half of us will be living in apartments in the next 10 years will reach some sort of crisis point...

 You’re always hesitant in this game to claim that you have a regular slot, anywhere, doing anything.  Or you should be - it's usually a guaranteed precursor to getting the hook. But I guess after almost 10 years of guesting on James Valentine’s Afternoons on ABC radio, I can say that, yes, I do get an occasional 25 minutes of radio fame. So, for those of you who miss it, I am now posting pod...