FLAT CHAT WRAP

OK, I admit it – we’ve been in holiday mode. Could we have cobbled together a podcast on Sunday morning after New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay, as we call it in “ma hoose”)? Maybe. Would it have been uplifting, entertaining and enlightening?  Maybe not so much. However, we will be back, renewed and recharged next week when we will have plenty to talk about, starting with the 15-month battle it took for...

In this our last Flat Chat Wrap podcast of the year, we kick the tyres of a couple of issues that will have consequences throughout strata. Or will they? And we suggest some holiday viewing aimed solidly at apartment dwellers. Given that half the residents of our strata schemes are renters, recent changes in the law could impact on a lot of people living in and owning apartments and townhouses. Th...

What a relief! With Sue back in the podcast saddle, and now that we are very much in holiday season, we can lighten the mood a little – especially since we have just registered our 50,000th download. But first we talk about a block that has a limit on home swaps, where overseas owners exchange homes for a couple of weeks at a time.  The restriction may have been legal a couple of years ago but, un...

OK, I admit it, I’m becoming obsessed with what is happening – or not happening – in Victoria. And I mean Victoria, Australia, not the capital of British Columbia, as the advertising bot on our podcast provider seems to think. Apologies if last week’s podcast started with a noisy ad for Canadian radio. This is what happens when artificial intelligence turns out to be not as smart as it thinks it i...

This week’s podcast is short but not very sweet (despite it being our 200th). Sue is away in the UK, which allows me to vent about a couple of issues that have been bugging me. They are not particularly new – it’s just I’ve been irked by new examples. The first is based on a post to the Forum which details how a small-scale developer and his family have cynically and meticulously manipulated the v...

Are you feeling under-exposed and ill-informed?  That may be because the much-vaunted NSW strata data Hub doesn’t tell anyone who doesn’t already know stuff very much about your apartment blocks at all. We take a look at the information available on the Hub to non-residents (not much) and residents (not much more) and what’s in the “coming soon” section (ditto).Which prompts the question – if havi...

It’s a longer than usual podcast this week so strap yourselves in. Firstly we look at the Owners Corporation Network’s (OCN) 10-point manifesto which they have announced leading up to next year’s NSW state election. It’s part wish-list and part statement of intent and you can read it in detail here. What we discuss is why those demands are there and what it might mean if they are taken up by the n...

There’s a little bit of everything in this week’s podcast.  We start with a story about how people who either ignore or don't know by-laws and regulations (not to mention common sense and personal responsibility), can get their come-uppance. And then we slide into the second part of the Lawyer in the Hot Seat webinar with David Bannerman. But first we bring you the story of a person who reall...

I know we already have two posts up on the website but we couldn’t let the news that an insurer is going to offer a 10-year warranty on new apartment blocks pass without comment. This is a huge deal for apartment buildings in NSW and, you would have to think, for the rest of Australia too (if their state governments can get over their instinctive and deep-seated contempt for apartment owners and r...

Co-podder Sue Williams and I took ourselves off to the Owners Corporation Network’s 20th anniversary event last week and it turned out to be a very revealing evening indeed. OK, the plaudits and praise were flowing faster than the free wine – and that’s saying something. I hosted and Sue delivered a fascinating speech about how the OCN was formed in the darkest days of battle against corrupt devel...

Can you imagine that you simply want to exercise your rights to have your defects fixed and a representative from the developer bails you up in the street and tells you people have been killed for less. Or your chair was in cahoots with the developer and agreed to an $80,000 pay-off for $3million worth of defects? Or your strata manager was so incompetent that he put the strata scheme’s legally bi...

Surprise, surprise! What started off looking like a barren day on the pod-front, right at the end of the school holidays,  turned out to give us a lot to talk about. First of all, there was the fact that apartment rents are rising three times faster than house rents, and what that could mean for inner cities with both tourists and overseas students on their way back in droves. We also touch on the...

This week on the Flat Chat website we celebrate the launch of Sue's new book about spray-on skin pioneer, Professor Fiona Wood. What's the link with strata? Well, if there ever was a cladding fire and someone was badly burned and ... em ... OK, Sue's the link. Forgive us for indulging in a little self-promotion. Elsewhere on the pod, we take a closer look at the much-vaunted (by us...

This week’s podcast is mostly (but not entirely) focussed on an announcement we believe is going to change the way we buy apartments in NSW and probably across Australia. Last week NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler announced the first four developers in NSW to achieve more than four out of five gold stars from the state’s revolutionary Independent Construction Industry Rating Tool (iCIRT).A...

OK, it’s our stupid fault for crossing the ditch to New Zealand without taking even our basic recording gear. We could have just about coped and recorded it on our return but our flight was delayed by an hour and a half and that mean that not only would we be later than planned in getting back to Sydney but we’d be tired and grumpy too. Then I discovered my phone has an “interview” setting in its...

If NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler has served no other function, he earns our respect and gratitude for being a very useful source of entertaining, informative and occasionally horrifying stories. The latest, from a parliamentary committee meeting, involves an allegation that development company’s executives had tried to smear him with a suggestion that he had demanded a $5million bribe t...

It’s hardly a true crime podcast but this week, inspired by connections made in the press between the relatives of property developers and their friends with police records,  we wade into the murky waters of past cases where the Venn diagrams of criminals and property developers have overlapped. It should be no surprise to anyone that the high-risk, high rewards ventures like unregulated property...

Look, we know it’s all done and dusted. David Chandler has re-extended his contract as NSW Building Commissioner, John Minns is back as Property Services Commissioner and Victor Dominello has returned as Fair Trading Minister (for now).In short, the band is back together and former Fair Trading Minister Eleni Petinos - the Yoko Ono of the strata Beatles – has retreated to Miranda where her skills...

In this week’s podcast we are going to discuss the local council that’s going to pay someone $100,000 a year to help residents fight high rise developments. It’s the least developed suburb in Sydney, so do they really need someone to take up cudgels against developers? According to this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, the move was triggered by a proposal – approved by the NSW's Eastern Ci...

We are in a state of shock here at Flat Chat, wondering if, when David Chandler and Victor Dominello both go, and with dodgy developers already circling the bleeding carcass of Fair Trading like vultures, are we going to be back to the bad old days of seriously defective apartment blocks being the norm? We had no idea when we recorded this podcast that Victor Dominello was about to announce his re...

If there is one area of NSW Liberal politics that may be glad that the kerfuffle over the appointment of a trade envoy to New York is drawing so much media attention and political heat, it will be anyone associated with Fair Trading. When we sat down to record this week’s podcast and discuss – among other things – the departure of Property Services Commissioner John Minns, we had no idea how chaot...

There we were, all set with a podcast on David Chandler’s resignation in the can, when we heard that NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet had invited Fair Trading Minister Eleni Petinos to leave at her own chosen speed (one for the Dylan fans, there).Now, we could have fudged it with a new intro but Big Dave’s not-very-imminent departure was already old news and the vapour trail from Ms Petinos' exp...

Sometimes we are just too efficient for our own good. No sooner had we sent this week’s podcast off for transcription than the news broke that NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler had announced he will be leaving the job in November – just weeks after he signed a year-long extension to his contract. We’ve covered that in detail HERE and will pick up on the news for next week’s podcast. Meanwhi...

Last week saw the publication of a confected scandal of an elderly couple who’d been given bad advice, blaming their owners corporation for a special levy of $18,000 that had blown out to a debt of $44,000.As we pointed out in this story, and on this podcast, the owners corp were probably just fulfilling their legal obligation to fix common property and charge owners according to their unit entitl...

This week on the podcast we hop into the highly dubious story that appeared in the Sydney Sun-Herald this week about a poor old couple who are facing bankruptcy because of a special levy imposed on their block by a heartless and cruel strata committee …Hang on! Heartless and cruel? Strata committees can’t set special levies.  And owners corporations have to maintain and repair common property. The...