FLAT CHAT WRAP

We’re back and this is an absolute blockbuster, which, considering the topic, is an oddly ironic term. Last week Sue had an exclusive interview with NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler about the benighted Mascot Towers – the building that started crumbling about five years ago and whose evacuated former residents have been living in rental accommodations since. Did I say five years? Turns out...

We have an absolute rock star podcast guest this week, in NSW Building Commission Policy Director Angus Abadee. Angus gave us a good 20 minutes of his valuable time to explain what the recent expansion of the building commission means, as well as the significance of the new laws passed recently. The topics touched on included how they identify and approach developers they think might be cutting co...

Don’t know if Building Commissioner David Chandler has a hotline to Santa but with the  Building Commission being boosted from 40 to 400 inspectors , you’d have to think his Christmas wishes have come true. Then there’s the government plan to compel developers to include affordable and social housing in their schemes if they want to get approval – no trade-offs or sneaky deals for added floors.  A...

It’s a packed Wrap this week with a lot happening in and around strata. Global credit rating and data analysis agency Equifax – the people who measure how many of David Chandler’s gold stars developers should get – have conducted a survey into how confident apartment buyers are in the properties they plan to purchase. The answer is “not very” … unless they have a few of those highly sought-after g...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap we talk about the proposal to introduce architectural pattern books in NSW. Will they mean even more cookie-cutter apartment blocks or will  it simply result in the buildings that we need in a hurry not looking like they were designed in a primary school handicrafts project? Then we look at what has happened at an apartment block that was only a few years ago named as...

Some big, big issues have shuffled shamelessly into the glare of the podcast spotlight his week. Firstly we talk about the buying and selling of management rights and how that has become a huge, $8billion dollar business nationally. Should we be worried that this is starting to creep into NSW and Victoria from Queensland, where the legalised rorting of apartment owners through pre-selling the righ...

The Wrap has gone all-electric this week, starting with Sue resolutely defending her e-scooter in the face of growing fears about fires from Lithium-ion batteries (and J immy’s column from the AFR). So what causes ebike and escooter battery fires? How do you prevent them? What is “thermal runaway”?  And what can apartment blocks do to keep its residents safe when there are potentially dangerous ba...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap we welcome freshly minted Strata Commissioner John Minns (not to be confused with NSW Premier Chris Minns) to tell us about his new role, his challenges and hopes. For the past two years John has been NSW Property Services Commissioner, keeping an eye on real estate agents, strata managers and building managers – and lots of ancillary professions and trades. Now he’s...

We’re heading across the border to Victoria this week where the Greens are flexing their balance-of-power muscle by demanding changes to the state housing program, as detailed in this post on the Flat Chat website. We ask what it is that they want, and which demands they are most likely to negotiate away to get other elements of the deal over the line. Will it be their demand for 30 per cent of al...

In this week’s podcast we find ourselves victims of the kind of scams we have been warning people about for a couple of years. We are about to go to the first AGM of our new apartment block and have discovered there is a very meaty embedded network rort afoot. Rather than pay for a vital piece of infrastructure, our developers want us to lease it at an exorbitant rate and one which will add up to...

There’s good news for those abandoned covid fur-babies and the apartment residents who’d love to offer them new homes.  The highly dubious tactics clearly aimed at deterring people from having pets in apartments – workarounds for the ban on blanket pet bans, if you like – will be knocked over in proposed changes to NSW strata law. Application fees, pet bonds and demands for additional insurance co...

This week, we open up with a chat about our increasingly popular polls and the surprising results this week revealing what annoys you most about your neighbours. Then we take a look at what NSW Premier Chris Minns really means when he “declares war on Nimbys”.   If as this article suggests , he may use his power to let his minions, aka senior civil servants, rule on projects held up by recalcitran...

Busy, busy, busy in the Flat Chat bunker this week. We start with a wrap-up of what went on at the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) Strata Matters conference last week including a grab-bag of politicians talking about what’s been done and what still needs to be achieved in strata. Then, prompted by a thought from Sydney MP Alex Greenwich that NSW might consider a tax on short-term holiday lets, li...

This week we introduce you to the concept of “downvesting” – no, it’s not a singlet fashioned from duck feathers, but a growing trend whereby impending retirees buy a property that they plan to downsize into but rent it out until they are ready to make the life-changing move. And we investigate the challenging concept of de-cluttering and how getting ready to move house could change your mind abou...

This week in the podcast, Sue reports back from a two-day seminar about property investment with the news that, yes, more apartments are going to be built in Australia and yes, some people are worried that there simply won’t be enough skilled labour or materials to get it done as quickly as we all want and need. However, there is some innovative thinking, whether it’s about how to deal with Nimbyi...

Sue is back from Europe – Huzzah! And that means not just a return of her dulcet tones but an injection of common sense into the proceedings.  And those proceedings are a discussion about the “missing middle” – low to medium rise apartment blocks and how some councils have managed to keep them out of their suburbs. We look at the cute and occasionally evil tactics that home buyers resort to, in or...

No sooner had we written about how paying levies is often the first thing to go when apartment owners are facing a cost-of-living crisis, than this story pops up on the ABC . It’s about a woman that got into so much debt that her owners corp eventually had her declared bankrupt.   In today’s podcast, Paul Morton of Lannock Finance explains why that didn’t need to happen and what the owners corp co...

Flying (almost) solo this week, Jimmy looks at a Sydney Morning Herald story which reveals the posh areas in Sydney where you can upgrade your address without paying the multi-million dollar costs of buying a trophy house. Karen Stiles, EO of the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) reveals the line-up for the upcoming Strata Matters conference . And, as the backlash against his revelations of even mo...

The podcast has an international flavour this week – and not just because co-host Sue dropped in just before she jetted off to Europe. Reports from Scotland suggest that build-to-rent apartments, one suggested solution to the housing shortage – and rent caps, one proposed solution to the cost-of-living crisis – don’t sit easily with each other. There are also reports from New York where Airbnb has...

We’re going interstate and all-ages this week but we start with a council on Sydney’s North Shore that has been served with a repair order for defects in a block in which they were co-developers. According to this story in the SMH , Lane Cove council is finding out the hard way what happens when you get into bed with a developer who goes bust. After that we look at serious rumblings from Queenslan...

It’s very much a mixed bag in this week’s podcast, not least because what’s good news for some in property prices is, inevitably, bad news for others. But first, we have a chat about embedded networks, what they are and how apartment buyers get tricked into paying for things that should be charged to developers. And, with mainstream property media finally catching up – we first raised this issue a...

This week we look at two apartment blocks that it’s pretty safe to say are at the opposite ends of the social spectrum. The first is a Housing Commission block that has just won the NSW Premier’s architecture award, stimulating serious high-rise envy and which could be an antidote to Nimbyism as well as the new form of property selfishness, ANTE …“And Not There Either”. (We call it ANOTE in the po...

This week we look at why so many strata disputes are getting stuck between NSW Fair Trading's mediators and NCAT's tribunal adjudicators - maybe it's because they don't talk to each other. And maybe it's because some disputes are between right and wrong and compulsory mediation can be a big fat waste of time.   As if that weren't bad enough, NCAT doesn't even com...

There’s only one story in strata this week – Toplace, the developer of the benighted Vicinity building, went into receivership , leaving owners with an estimated bill of between $50m and $100m to rescue the sagging high-rise. Sue and to a lesser extent the Flat Chat website has been following this saga from day one. And it has a lot of moving parts, reading more like crime story than a property ya...

Whether you love or loathe Airbnb, you have to admit its founder, Brian Chesky, is a pretty smart guy.  Anyone who can parlay an idea to rent an airbed in a spare room into an $80 billion industry has to have more than good luck going for him. So when he starts promoting a shift back to people welcoming travellers into spare rooms in their homes – rather than letting whole homes to complete strang...