FLAT CHAT WRAP

Last week we discussed the new report from the NSW Office of the Building Commissioner – they’re calling it a case study – titled “Broken Promises, Blame Games and Balconies”. It’s a big document but essential reading for anyone in an apartment block that’s about to pursue a claim for defects or is concerned about the way the whole housing industry is going (or not). The case study follows, in gra...

When NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler commissioned a case study into what happened when serious defects were discovered in a new block's balconies, it revealed a trail of denials, delays, obfuscation and bloody mindedness. That deeply flawed process just to see residents being allowed to step out on to their balconies cost the owners and developers a combined total of more than $2 mil...

This week we bring you the second part of Strata Lawyer David Bannerman's Q&A session with Flat Chat's Jimmy Thomson asking the questions sent by Flat Chat readers and Bannerman Lawyers' clients. This week the topics include:  Reclassifying common property in community schemes (to avoid paying levies); Fraud on the minority; Cost recovery by-laws to deter action by owners; Breac...

There’s a change of pace in the Flat Chat Wrap this week as we replay the first 30 minutes of our online chat with leading strata lawyer David Bannerman. Jimmy was invited on to his podcast channel to fire questions at him in a session he calls “Lawyer in the Hot Seat". In the first 30 minutes we covered topics as diverse as the Design and Building Practitioners Act, new building defects, ret...

 The housing crisis is still uppermost in many minds but there's a new twist with a former Mirvac boss, now an advisor to the government, telling the Prime Minister to do something he knows is right but is political poison. Then there's a new way of investing in rental properties without becoming an evil landlord (or lady). Airbnb founder Brian Chesky "airbrushes" the global ho...

It seems we have a new culprit on whom to blame Australia’s housing shortage – Nimbys. Sue has collated a raft of newspaper articles here , here and here , all of which state or imply that the fault for not enough homes being built lies with local authorities who cave into their constituents’ demands not to have high-rise buildings in their burbs. Look, there are many factors that have led to the...

There’s a different sound to the Flat Chat Wrap this week, Firstly it was recorded over Zoom, then Jimmy seems to have acquired hay fever in  the south of France, the lavender-growing capital of the world. And then it’s been hastily edited on his laptop in between hikes, hotel moves and failing internet. But the show must go and and this week Jimmy and Sue talk about what difference (if any) last...

It's a mixed bag in the podcast this week - but there's a lot of doom and gloom about. We have the Reserve Bank threatening more interest rate rises (to try to get us to keep our credit cards in our wallets). There's a story in a Sydney paper that investors could be paying $17,000 a month AFTER they've collected their rent on their property, thanks to interest rate rises. There...

If you’ve ever wondered whether you really need to set aside funds or organise a loan for future lift repairs or replacement, try getting stuck in one for half an hour. Jimmy tells of his brief incarceration (and escape) in this week’s podcast and he and Sue discuss maintaining old lifts and even adding new ones to older buildings. But first they look at property prices, with the latest figures su...

With the media dominated by the passing last week of Barry Humphries and Fr Bob Maguire, our Artificial Intelligence first-rough transcriptions service managed to conflate our brief tributes to both and come up with Barry McGuire. Boomers may recall that that Barry was the singer of the Dylanesque Eve of Destruction, back in 1965.  Although we will miss our Barry and Bob, both giants in their fiel...

We wander down some well-trodden tracks in this week’s podcast, but there are a few twists and turns to keep you on your toes. We dissect the arguments in a long missive from Airbnb about why it’s not their fault that there’s a housing crisis.  The basic flaw in their argument – we need to build more homes (true) - is that building homes takes years but banning short-term lets could put more than...

There’s been a lot happening behind the scenes in Strataland over Easter.  For a start, there’s the latest astonishing figures on booming rent rises across Australia.   Is it any surprise that the area with the lowest rent rises just happens to be the one with the only rent caps in the country? You awake, Chris Minns? Speaking of whom, NSW has a new Fair Trading Minister, Anoulack Chanthivong, and...

 Queensland held a round table about housing and homelessness recently as the Sunshine State faces a similar crisis to the rest of Australia when it comes to a shortage of housing – including apartments – and a lack of available rentals. We pick the bones out of the proposal to limit rent rises to once a year and the dismissal of other radical reforms that were proposed. You can read the ABC news...

Ah, the perils of trusting poll predictions immediately after an election.  While Labor have definitely won and Chris Minns is definitely the new Premier of NSW, the balance of power is still in doubt (at time of writing). Does that mean that the Greens have regained considerable influence – something that we say in the podcast has slipped through their fingers? Apparently not. A couple of indepen...

This week sees us return to familiar ground both geographically and in terms of our topic as we take a look at an SBS Dateline episode set in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. Five years ago, Jimmy was in Edinburgh and was interviewed for the Scottish edition of the Times newspaper (see above), warning the city that it faced a rental crisis if it didn’t curb Airbnb and other short term letting agenc...

It seems as if every time we look away from Victoria, some thing new and awful happens in that state’s strata system. If it wasn’t the best buildings in Melbourne being handed over wholesale to Airbnb, with no meaningful restrictions, it was the cladding fires, then the cladding remediations revealing buildings that were rotting from the inside and now we have the Aurora shambles. This week in the...

This week’s podcast may have an international flavour – Jimmy is in Scotland and Sue in Sydney --  but it covers familiar territory. First up we talk about a campaign to bring NSW’s rental laws into line with Victoria’s where landlords may not unreasonably refuse a request by a tenant to bring a pet into their property. Given that both states now have strata laws that mean schemes can’t impose bla...

We are all used to being told that we only own the air inside our apartments’ walls, although not the walls themselves, depending on which uniquely quirky set of strata laws you live under. But how about owning the air above your apartment block?  Or even the apartment block next door? What would you do with it?  Whay would you need it?  And what if the developer has already sold it to someone els...

No sooner had we said last week that Queensland needed to look at their “collective sales” laws – allowing a super majority of owners to compel the minority to sell their units – than the state government there announced that’s exactly what they plan to do. The precise process for this remains to be thrashed out in parliamentary committeesn, but you are dealing with a community that values – possi...

This week we offer you a podcast with all the bells and whistles – more accurately, it’s drums and gongs, as we take a brief detour to listen in on the community group that hilariously drowned out Sue’s latest talk on her books. On more serious issues,  this week’s Podcast covers three contentious areas of apartment living and the first two concern apartment blocks that have been rendered uninhabi...

There’s some good news and some possibly calamitous bad news in this week’s podcast. Firstly, the number of apartment building approvals was up by more than 50 per cent in December, month on month. Then a major league developer has told state governments they need to make much more of an effort on affordable and build-to-rent apartments. But all of that is in the future.  Right now, tens of thousa...

The issue we raised last week rumbles on with experienced waterproofers claiming they are being driven out of the industry in NSW while engineers and builders line up to take sides. We can see why there was a need to tighten the regulations but if it ends up with competent operators being forced out of the industry, leading to strata schemes not being able to fix their common property or, even wor...

This week we look at how one of the greatest conveniences in apartment blocks could be not only costing you money but undermining efforts at recycling. The humble garbage chute can be a major pain in the wallet if it’s misused, and a threat to recycling if residents chose to drop rather than sort. We have advice for a radio superstar who’s having to move out of her home because of paparazzi pests....

We all know there’s a housing shortage and we are seeing signs of overseas workers and students coming back to our cities, so it should be no surprise that rents are going up. Yup, that old supply and demand equation never fails.  But the surprise part of all this is how rents on apartments are going up by so much more than on houses. We kick that around with some astonishing figure on this week’s...

A couple of issues popped on to the Flat Chat radar while we were off being festive. One was all about smoking on balconies which, if that wasn’t serious enough, raised the spectre of barbecues being banned from apartment blocks. Is the threat real and would anyone care? Or could we expect to see Sam Kekovich leading a protest march on state parliaments to deter our politicians from making any suc...