FLAT CHAT WRAP

This week’s podcast is inspired by a question on our Forum asking what to do about two office-bearers who have taken bricks out of common property walls so as to install integrated bookshelves … with the predictable effect that has on noise insulation, not to mention fire safety. You can read the original post and responses here. All of which leads to a discussion about the dumb (and inconsiderate...

It’s another showbag of conflict, calm and coronavirus craziness on the Flat Chat Wrap podcast this week. First, inspired by a question from our Forum, we discuss what you can do when someone who shouldn’t even be at a strata committee meeting – his daughter is the lot owner – bullies the other members. Our suggested remedies range from using existing rules – non-members shouldn’t speak unless the...

If you are up to your eyes in paint, tiles and taps – or even better, just looking through the brochures as you prepare the domestic make-over you can’t put off any longer – you could do worse than listen to this week’s podcast. We’ve Zoomed in on interior designer Stephanie Bungard to discover the easiest and most effective way to make your apartment look fresh and inviting. For instance, do you...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast we encounter the best and worst in apartment living, from negative equity in off-the plan purchases, to multiple tenants causing parking chaos in a block that simply doesn’t know how to enforce their own by-laws. In between, as some positive relief, we chat to an architect who won four gongs at the recent NSW Architects award, including for a revolutionary hig...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast, in the run-up to the Australian architectural awards, we talk about some of the innovative apartment block designs that made it the short-list. For a start, there’s the Verve towers in Newcastle which offer more corner units because it’s two slim towers rather than one solid one. Judging by the above picture, it’s two slices rather than two fingers (as Jimmy...

It’s a bumper edition of the Flat Chat Wrap this week, boosted by an extract from JimmyT’s guest spot on James Valentine’s Afternoons on ABC radio. But first Jimmy and Sue revisit the worst apartments they have ever seen, inspired by stories of the block in Auburn, Sydney, that prompted Building Commissioner David Chandler to seek and get the most comprehensive changes to building and planning law...

After what has felt like several weeks of doom and gloom, we are looking on the bright side in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast. First of all we chat about Sue’s story in Domain about a new mixed development where affordable rentals will be mixed in with full-price apartments … and you will never know who’s paying full fare and who isn’t. The apartments will be identical so there will be no disc...

There are just two main discussions in this week’s podcast but the topics are both hugely significant in very different ways. In the first we look at the new powers given to NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler to deal with cowboys in the building industry (hence the cowboy music at the top of the podcast).In the second we hear from relationship counsellor and psychologist Amanda Gordon about...

There’s plenty of variety in this week’s forum, from pets to concieges, and from tourism promotions to a survey that suggests lower-income individuals and families do it toughest in apartment blocks. The Podcast opens with an examination of the Tribunal Appeals Panel’s ruling that strata blocks can have “no-pets” by-laws after all. The verdicts issued last week were the results of two appeals agai...

We seem to be so caught up in the day-to-day of avoiding or dealing with the coronavirus, so it’s refreshing to know that some people are thinking of a future way beyond that. In this week’s podcast, Sue Williams revisits a story about an ambitious vision for a brand new city planned for the area near the new airport at Badgerys Creek. If the architects and planners have their way, it will be self...

What is a strata lawyer’s job?  That’s the question we ask in the Flat Chat Wrap podcast this week. Is it to find a reasonable solution, based on strata law, so that all sides can feel that they have been treated fairly (even if their client has to concede some ground)?Or is it to go in all guns blazing, threatening and bullying the other party, using hypothetical situations where all the “ifs and...

It’s an extra long Flat Chat Wrap this week, so strap yourselves in. First of all, there’s a discussion about how our pets could be getting stressed from getting too much attention. Apparently dogs and, especially, cats just need to be left alone sometimes, especially when they aren’t used to you hanging around the house all day. Resist the temptation to pat your napping cat on the head every time...

Are you a gym junkie, hanging out for those palaces of pain, sweat and tears to re-open? Or are you just coming to the gradual conclusion that binge-watching TV while binge-eating corn chips and guacamole will come with a reckoning (somewhere around your waistline), some day soon. Well, if you're going to get moving, there's no time like the present - and time may be something of which y...

Sometimes the way we want to live influences architecture, sometimes architecture influences the way we live. There are still older blocks dotted around Sydney’s harbour suburbs where someone who wanted a penthouse with a view, constructed several floors of units for rent to support (in so many ways) the fabulous pad on the roof. Some original apartment blocks in our inner-cities have tiny kitchen...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap, Jimmy and Sue discuss the competing and often conflicting needs of those who are working from home and those who are working on their homes. On the one hand, there’s never been a better time to catch up on those little jobs – and some big ones – around the flat. People who live in houses are doing it, getting to project manage their own renovations.  For apartment dw...

This week’s Flat Chat Wrap has just about everything; pets, tradies, TV shows set in apartments and, of course, Airbnb - plenty to keep your spirits up through the Lockdown. Before we get to Jimmy’s rant about Airbnb (Sue says he is “obsessed”), there are other issues you might want to wrap your headphones around. For instance, did you know you can foster a pet, and that’s foster, rather than adop...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap. Jimmy and Sue look at the wealth of good advice about how to get through this crisis without the whole system falling around our ears. We log into a comprehensive newsletter that covers everything from managing facilities to online meeting etiquette for these days of Zoom and Skype. Even if your block is not  managed by our sponsors Strata Choice, you can access thei...

In this week’s extra-long Flat Chat Wrap, obsession with coronavirus is spreading like, well, a virus.  Jimmy and Sue discuss how it may be having a crippling effect on that other viral sensation from recent years … Airbnb. Not only are their potential guests staying home, whether or not they want to, there was the decision by Airbnb head office to waive all cancellation fees, plus NSW hosts are a...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap, Jimmy and Sue discuss Australia's coronavirus lockdown and what it means to people living in apartments. There’s the whole issue of returned travellers settling in to 14 days of self-isolation and whether or not they really will wear masks when they pass through common property, as government health measures demand. We look at lifts and whether or not we should...

In this week’s Podcast, Jimmy and Sue examine the plusses and minuses in the new NSW rental laws, which tilt things in tenants’ favour but don’t go all the way. For instance, tenants will be able to make changes to their rented properties – subject to approval that can’t reasonably be refused – and they’ll be able to demand minimum standards of habitation. They’ll know what their break fees will b...

JimmyT and Sue discuss his long chat with the building commissioner, what you can do to avoid coronavirus in your apartment block and how Sue learned about the great Australian toilet roll panic, all over the newspapers ... in India. If you want to get new episodes of the Flat Chat Wrap and as soon as they are posted, just subscribe to one of the links underneath the player at the top of this page...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap, JimmyT and Sue Williams discusses the possibility of having free, or non-profit strata managers. Would it work, who would use the service and wouldn’t rich owners in boutique blocks just rort the system if it was done on the basis of the size of the building? Also they talk about the 100-year-old converted mansion where the owners ripped out a faulty alarm system and...

Roughly once a month JimmyT drops into the ABC radio studios for a chat with James Valentine about strata and all the myriad related subjectsThis month they start off talking about charging electric cars in strata schemes but pretty soon the calls from JV's listeners start pouring in. One caller wants to know if the owners in two out of three buildings in the same strata scheme should be resp...

This week on the Flat Chat Wrap we ask whether retired business people are the best or the worst committee members you can have. Based on this column, Jimmy and Sue weigh the pros and cons of people who have experience and maturity, with the fact that they may also be used to getting their own way, are a little too keen to hold on to power when they get it, and often block the appointment of young...

In this week’s podcast, with the East Coast states of Australia only just having survived the bushfires, we are now dealing with torrential rain and floods. Sue has contacted the big property insurers to discover an astonishing amount of damage claims had been lodged as early as Monday morning after the weekend storms. And we examine what can go wrong in apartment blocks despite a feeling of being...