FLAT CHAT WRAP

As we emerge from our “close contact” self-isolation we are probably going to have to go back into hiding after the selfie we took of ourselves still at work, despite lockdowns, which appeared in the Fin Review last weekend. Responses have ranged from “a picture-perfect combination of domestic bliss and productivity” to “oh, dear … you look like two crazy old people.”Of course, either or both of t...

There's a saying going around that it's the hope that kills you - and certainly, fans of the Scotland, Sweden, France, Netherlands and German football teams at the European Championships would concur. Of course, it's nonsensense. If anything kills you, it's complacency. You walk around feeling like you're immune and then you find out the person sitting next to you in a caf...

OK, it’s not in the same category as someone getting a couple of million clicks on a Tik Tok movie of them trying on a new pair of trainers, but Hyperbole Towers, the Flat Chat venture into “PodCom” quietly clicked over 1000 listens at the weekend. Hyperbole Towers is the pilot episode of what would once have been called a radio sitcom, set in an apartment block where a long-suffering chairperson...

Covid-19 is back in the news in new, super-infectious variants, and in the podcast this week we ask the highly relevant question of what do you do if it comes to your apartment block? Do you expect everyone in your block to be told that someone is self-isolating because they have been tested, or were in a certain place at the same time as an infected person, or if they just have a bit of a cough a...

We’re looking at some big news this week on the podcast and wondering what it all means. NSW Fair Trading has announced that they will be appointing a properties commissioner - like building commissioner David Chandler, only maybe without the fear factor – to help regulate all the professions involved in looking after buying, selling, renting and managing properties. What might those professions b...

This week in the podcast Sue Williams is in Darwin on an assignment, and finds that not only is Darwin the hottest city in Australia temperature-wise (probably … apart from Alice … and maybe Coober Pedy) it has the hottest property market with house prices going up an astonishing amount and apartments not far behind. Then we delve into the woes of the Toplace developers – or maybe their off-the-pl...

This week on the podcast we look GOMO, specifically grief over missing out on your dream home. It’s the other side of FOMO, where fear of missing out has you plunging headlong into what might be unwise purchases and contracts. When it comes to houses, it can feel more like a seduction and betrayal when you’ve been encouraged to imagine living there for years of domestic bliss, then the faithless v...

We admit we can get a little city-centric here at Flat Chat so last weekend it was good to get out of the urban jungle and find out what’s happening elsewhere. And the news is that Newcastle is booming, beach holiday homes are bouncing back and the roads are almost as crazy as they were pre-covid. Back in what passes for the real world, in this week’s Flat Chat we talk about how construction insur...

There is no building in Sydney that has polarised opinions more than the Sirius apartments on Circular Quay – unless you include the Opera House, its architectural antithesis across the bay. After years of controversy, plans have been revealed and expressions of interest sought in what will be a revolutionary revamp of the former housing commission apartment block. You can read more about it the m...

With property prices soaring but houses outstripping apartments, as detailed in this story, we try to make sense of it all. Why is the gap between the cost of houses and apartments growing, even though apartment prices are coming back up to pre-pandemic levels. And will the current apartment glut in Melbourne – with consequential 11 per cent drops in rents – flip to a shortage, soaring sales price...

If you have a hankering for the high life and have a lazy $22 million lying around, you could score an apartment in the huge Crown tower above James Packer’s (currently non-functioning) casino. If that’s too rich for your blood, how much would you expect to pay for a two-bed, two-bath pad on a lower floor? All is revealed in our Flat Chat Wrap podcast this week. But before we get to that, there’s...

There’s a horror story, a happy ending and a bit of housekeeping in this week’s podcasts. The horror is the $714 million owed by Home Building Compensation for all the insurable building defects in Australian homes. And that is money that we, the taxpayers, will eventually have to payIt was all revealed in this story in the Sun-Herald which made us think, if that’s the level of defects in homes th...

Apologies for subjecting you to another short-term letting vent, but after last week's state government schemozzle when the new holiday rental regulations were announced, then shelved, we thought we’d better have a look at what was going on. And it turns out it was a case of history repeating itself. Remember a couple of years ago when the then Planning Minister Anthony Roberts and former Bet...

Sometimes you can be just too efficient. There we were with the NSW government's proposed regulations on short-term letting hot off the printer, plus industry responses and reactions from apartment owners ... then the Government panicked in the face of widespread complaints from all directions and put them on hold. Just as well this week’s podcast also deals with those other perennial issues...

This week, having survived a computer crisis on the home office front, we delve deeper into the differences between the way renters are treated in Victoria and NSW.In the same week that Victoria’s new rental laws come in, curbing “no reason” evictions of tenants, NSW Fair Trading confirms that they will be reinstated as soon as the post-Covid period is over in September. So why should property own...

In what turned out to be a fairly hectic week we hit a very welcome speedbump in the form of enforced rest and relaxation at a new apartment block launch, of all places. The apartment block was Portman on the Park in Sydney’s Green Square where Mirvac launched their latest concept with an evening of meditation, massage and mineral water. You can hear all about that and what’s so different about th...

In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap we discuss the awful story about the young woman who put her life savings into a deposit on a flat in a block that’s turned out not only to be riddled with defects, but was certified by an unlicensed tradie and subsequently OK’d by the local council. Now she faces the very real choice between losing her $60k+ deposit or finalising the purchase of a flat she knows is s...

Are you over working from home?  Does your formerly perfectly adequate apartment now seem tiny.  Is your kitchen table too high and your laptop screen too small? Are you one of those people who gets up and dresses as if they were going to the office – then just goes to the spare room? Or do you take personal pride in how much of the day you can spend in your pyjamas? Importantly, and are you missi...

There’s a few differences in this week’s podcast from previous editions. For a start, Sue is on the other end of a Zoom call as she takes advantage of easing travel restrictions to get out and promote her new book … and finds herself attacked by birds on the Gold Coast. Having survived that, we discuss the latest twist in the pets saga as celebrity dog owners are told they are living in a cats-onl...

What do you do when you want the shared responsibility of strata but don’t particularly want to live with people above and below you? You buy or rent a townhouse, which is the fancy-pants modern name for what we used to call terraces. It seems that while pre-sales and construction of apartments are going down, sales of townhouses are on the way up and in this week’s podcast, we discuss why that mi...

Every so often – about once a month – I get invited on to James Valentine’s Afternoons on ABC 702.Last week the topic was pets in apartments – partly because that was all anyone was talking about. So we had a couple of people ringing up with their pet questions and complaints, all of which has indirectly added to a pet-heavy Flat Chat website this week. And that was exacerbated by my response to a...

In this week’s podcast we give the NSW Parliament’s deliberations on it’s new strata pet laws a kick along. As reported here, the Lower House has taken a good six months to deal with a procedural Bill that would have promoted sustainability and tidied up several odd loopholes in strata law. However, it was tagged with an amendment that would have meant pets could only be excluded from apartments i...

The Flat Chat wrap this week is taken up with three main topics. The first is a petition to parliament to create a blacklist of bad landlords … launched by someone who is a landlord herself. Victoria is about to get one next month and it seems only fair that, if NSW tenants can be put on a blacklist that makes it harder for them to get rentals, then bad landlords should also be named and shamed in...

Hi, did you miss us?  We took a little break last month but we are back with our new, improved Flat Chat Wrap podcast. We – Sue Williams and JimmyT – are now working on the basis that less is more. We are still going to talk about the apartment living issues of the day, large and small, to keep you informed and amused. But we’re going to put a clock on it so while our thoughts may occasionally wan...

Do you know what your strata-living tribe is? Are you economically engaged, young and jobless or under-employed, battlers, established owners, downsizers or even public housing tenants? Professor Bill Randolph of UNSW department of the Built Environment was recently interviewed for an extensive feature in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he discussed a survey that reveals the reality of who is l...