Every balcony he tested had dangerous balustrades and he told the Executive Committee chairman that probably all the fixtures on hundreds of balconies needed to be replaced as a matter of urgency before someone was either seriously injured by falling glass or by falling themselves.

The EC quietly decided to ignore his advice as the cost of replacing all the fittings on every balcony was ‘prohibitive’. The tradie wanted to know if he was liable if he knew there was a problem that they didn’t fix?

I advised him to make sure he sent a written report that clearly spelled out the dangers of not taking action. It’s then up to the Owners Corp which has a legal obligation to maintain and repair common property and could be sued if anyone was hurt.

However, I was talking to Michael Teys (whose strata law firm is one of this website’s sponsors) and he warned it’s even more serious if there is anyone working in strata buildings, either as tradesman working on common property or employed in commercial areas of the strata plan.

Under Work Health and Safety legislation that came into force on January 1st, Owners Corps who ignore warnings of a potential danger to people working in or for their buildings face possible fines of millions of dollars, while EC members could be jailed.

“Worst case, which would be recklessness causing risk of death or serious injury, it’s up to a $3 million fine for the Owners Corp and $600,000 fines and/or five years in jail for individual committee members,” says Michael. “And your EC insurance won’t cover you – deliberate negligence will invalidate most strata insurance policies.”

This is one area where feigning ignorance definitely isn’t bliss. “Courts take a dim view of this,” says Michael.  “Executive Committee members pretending they didn’t know could be subjected to higher fines.”

You can access Michael’s Work Health and Safety Q&A HERE.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Unfortunately for the owner, her mother was ill and she’d had to return to Croatia to look after her.  Would my friend mind living in the flat on her own for at least six months?

Would she ever?  Then came an email telling Gina to fax over a CV, a recent bank statement  and a photocopy of her passport.  Keys would be couriered to her.

Hang on, says Gina, I haven’t seen the flat yet. “Darling, of course you must see it,” gushed another email. “But I can’t send you the keys until you send me proof of identity.”

Smelling a rat, Gina went to the address and discovered it was an office block.  She emailed the dubious ‘roomy’ that she was no longer interested.

As attempts at identity theft go, this was fairly clumsy but you have to wonder how many home-hunting hopefuls fell for it.

Tell us your weird and wonderful flat hunting stories on flat-chat.com.au/forum.

Join the forum discussion on this post

If you don’t like your by-laws, you can change them.  But if you’ve got reasonable rules in place, enforcement shouldn’t be at the whim of your executive committee or strata manager.

Take this story I was sent last week; an example of what happens when an executive committee is too gutless or lazy to do the right thing.

The couple concerned had a long-running problem with often unsupervised children squealing and shrieking on the common property roadway outside their townhouse from afternoon till late at night.

When they asked the kids to play at their own home or keep the noise down, they were threatened and abused by the parents. Police advised them to take out an Apprehended Violence Order but that made no difference.

So they recorded the noise, noted events, collected signatures from other residents and took the evidence to an executive committee meeting.  They were told it was a personal issue.

It wasn’t – it was about multiple by-law breaches, but the shrinking violets on the EC didn’t want to know.

Typically, the Consumer Trader and Tenancy Tribunal wasn’t much help.  The adjudicator targetted only one culprit out of many – making it really personal – and dismissed one complaint on a pedantic interpretation of a by-law.  It’s easy to nitpick when you’re not suffering the consequences.

Now the noise is so bad that the couple have to move out at weekends. They’ve had filthy nappies thrown in their yard, torches shone in their windows and their front door repeatedly bashed late at night.  The so-called adults abuse them in front of the kids, who stand around cheering.

The Executive Committee could and should have sent a message to these animals that their behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated. But by-law enforcement is optional so they ducked the issue and let one innocent couple suffer Hell in their own home. Wimps!

You can read the whole sorry tale  by going HERE and scrolling down to the posting by ‘Mailbox’

Join the forum discussion on this post

ANSWER:  It would never occur to me to ask if a landlord owned the property but it is a valid question.

“You should be able to visit your local Council and see who owns the property by giving its address,” writes FlatChatFan. “Otherwise in NSW you can pay for the information through Land & Property Information.

“The owner needs to give you a valid Lease form to sign as well.  Lease forms (in NSW) are available at Newsagents, but if your potential landlord only wants a “handshake” deal I would be concerned. ”

Yeah, me too.  Go to the tenants.org.au website which has a stack of fact sheets.

“I rented direct off an owner a few years back,” says Boronia. “I got a standard residential lease and didn’t have any problems. Rent was a bit cheaper, because there were no agent’s fees. One phone call usually sorted out any problems because he cared about his investment.”

Join the forum discussion on this post

However our neighbour, who is on the EC, says it will be fine as long as we get it done professionally.  Our lease says we can barely hang a picture without the landlord’s permission and our agent’s default position is to say ‘no’.  Can we by-pass them and go straight to the executive committee for the OK?- SquareEyes, Cronulla.

ANSWER: You read the by-laws?!? You already sound like exceptional tenants. However, the EC can’t give you permission to do something the landlord hasn’t approved. He has to ask them for permission.

So put together a package that makes it as easy as possible for the agent to say yes – letter to the EC for them to sign, a quote from reputable installers, agreement to make good any damage to the wall when you leave.

If they say no, contact the owner. They’ll be glad to know they have such diligent tenants who are clearly planning to stay for a while.

Join the forum discussion on this post

They dominate meetings and either badger everyone else into submission or, if that fails, mount disruptive campaigns within the building to overturn decisions.

“Because he is so persistent, aggressive, and negative, EC members have caved in to his point of view in the past,” JudyE wrote to the Flat Chat Forum, wanting to know what they can do to counter this particular breed of highly disruptive boardroom bully.

She goes on to say that the rogue EC member has enough support in the building to ensure he can’t be voted off the committee at a general meeting, as well as possibly revoking decisions with which he disagrees.

Meanwhile Crazy Larry tells his supporters what a pack of idiots everyone else is.  But they don’t see him in action and some may give him their proxy votes to get him to go away.  So what do you do?

Firstly I would get serious.  Find a book on how to conduct meetings and take a formal agreement (preferably at a general meeting) to abide by its recommended standing orders. The website masterofmeetings.com has some good suggestions.

Or your chairman could limit discussion on each item on the agenda to say five minutes before you take a vote and insist that everyone has their say at least once before anyone gets to speak for a second time.

If you have rock solid rules, you can then censure Crazy Larry for bad behaviour, which will appear in the minutes.

Finally, get owners to agree that all meetings should be recorded (audio is fine) and create a Facebook page where you post an unedited audio from each meeting.

Once his supporters hear what a bully Crazy Larry is, they may be less keen to support him and that might calm him down a bit.

How would you control a rogue EC member? Go here to read the original discussion.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Now the landlord is saying they can have the 12-month lease but they want the full rise. “I don’t want to move. Is this legal?” our reader asks.

Firstly, a new lease is a new deal and it’s entirely up to you whether you agree to its terms or not. If not, and the landlord wants you out, they have to give you 90 days notice in writing.

Otherwise, you can continue the periodic tenancy and the landlord or their agent must give you 60 days written notice of a rent increase. However they can raise the rent as often as they wish (as long as the rise isn’t excessive), so they could theoretically get their money, and more, anyway.

This is one of those situations where a reasonable compromise, backed up with a valid lease, would be the best outcome for everyone concerned. But check with tenants.org.au for all the facts before you decide what to do next.

Read the full (and quite complicated) original posting HERE.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Should executive committee members be a secret society or available for comment and complaint by phone, email and the occasional front-up?

This debate kicked off when Flat Chat Forum regular Unexpected Leigh wrote, “I sent a very polite email to a couple of the Executive Committee and was told in no uncertain terms it was an invasion of privacy … Am I in the wrong?”

Why would anyone be on the Executive Committee if they don’t want people to contact them, I replied.

Peter C agreed: “We have an information booklet in a loose leaf binder in each unit containing the name, unit number, phone number and email addresses of each executive committee member …”

Gilgal 1 is in favour too: “As an EC member and secretary of our OC, I can’t see why anyone on the EC should be upset at a resident or owner contacting them. Isn’t that our job as EC members?”

Bronco 17 wrote “We are trying to set up a central webpage/portal with email addresses … so that people can contact us.  This may solve the issue for your EC people, who may not want to give out their personal email address.”

However, a couple of posters think life as an EC member is tough enough without having their contact details available.

“If our EC has to have their details “published” for all to see, then we definitely wouldn’t have an EC at all,” says Struggler. “It was bad enough that owners knew my unit number.  I had people coming to my door, wanting me to personally give them permission for work, there and then.  So phone numbers and email as well?  No thanks!”

CBF “totally agrees … I have had more than one resident knocking on my door to abuse me and hold me personally responsible for Committee decisions. I hope the posters who would like all EC members’ contact details available consider the flack taken by these volunteers.

What do you think – full disclosure or “no name, no packdrill”? Go HERE to read the whole catastrophe and have your say anonymously.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Unless you have individual water meters, water will be charged to you in your levies on the basis of your unit entitlements rather than usage.

It means that lonely Ms Haversham in the sub-penthouse, who is environmentally aware and conserves water like a Supermax prisoner guards his food, could be paying five times as much for water as the couple and their couch-surfing mate in the studio on the ground floor (where the shower is their only refuge for ‘alone time’).

It’s even more of a sting if you are in a building with a centralised hot water system or, even worse, if you’re in a mixed commercial building with a cafe, hairdresser and launderette on the same system.

Apart from the inequity involved, this is a serious disincentive for water saving.  Why should Ms H bother saving water if she’s paying for the rest of the building?  Why would the mates in the studio care about how much hot water they use when they’re not charged for it?

And it’s not just the wasted water, there’s energy burned needlessly in pumping additional water to the upper floors of most buildings more than three storeys high.

Retrofitting individual meters is one answer although it could be costly and Sydney Water may complain about reading 120 meters instead of just one.  By the way, individual meters benefit landlords because tenants pay for their water usage rather than landlords paying a share of the building’s.

I heard recently that an apartment block had been planned with one water meter, one electricity meter and one gas meter for the whole building – because it’s cheaper for the developers.

Government should force all new strata developments to have individual metering and offer real help to give the rest of us control over our water bills.

The debate is heating up – go to the Forum to be part of it

Join the forum discussion on this post

That seems like a good return, especially since this building has a reputation for poor noise insulation.  Is it too good to be true? – Brunhilde, Potts Point.

ANSWER: Sounds like you might be looking at a classic ‘trampoline’ apartment block where tenants bounce in and out while they get the lie of the land on their way to something better.  As a former hotel, it may also have a lot of short-term lets.

This means that the $650 a week income could be eroded by periods of vacancy and associated letting fees. For instance three different tenants in a year with, say, two weeks of vacancy before each one, is going to cost you 12 weeks rent (the usual letting fee is two weeks rent).

Suddenly your $650 a week is more like $500.  So ask how often the flat lies vacant and for how long, and check the turnover of other properties in the building.  It could be a bargain but don’t get bounced on the trampoline.

Landlord or tenant problems? Log on to the forum and ask a question.

Join the forum discussion on this post