With state planning ministers meeting this month, informed in part by a behind-closed-doors meeting of development “stakeholders” in NSW last week, you can be sure that building defects in their…
There’s an interesting statistic that I never tire of quoting: no strata manager in NSW has ever been struck off for being really bad at his or her job. And…
In this week’s episode of the Flat Chat Wrap we look at the claims that the Opal and Mascot towers “disasters” are just the tip of a very large apartment…
This weekend, the Flat Chat column in the Financial Review will be about how to avoid buying an apartment in a dodgy building. In it, I discuss the importance of…
Rental laws are a big issue in strata, with more than half of apartments being occupied by tenants, meaning half of apartments are owned by investors. That’s a lot of…
Finances and, specifically, who’s behind in their levies are always sensitive topics at AGMs. You don’t want to embarrass your neighbours if they are doing it tough or maybe just…
One of the big questions around the recent Mascot Tower problems was why didn’t the building insurance kick in, rather than the state government having to bail the owners corporation…
It seems Airbnb (and other short-term holiday rental) stories are like buses – you don’t see any for a while then three come along at the same time. In their…
The news that the NSW government is offering an open-ended, low-interest loan to the Mascot Towers owners corporation (body corporate), to allow them to pay for evacuated residents’ emergency accommodation,…
NSW Fair Trading have released the details of their emergency accommodation package for residents evacuated from Mascot Tower and it includes a few interesting exclusions. For instance, people staying with…
The arrival of online short-term rental sites such as Airbnb and others, created a whole new landlord-tenant relationship: one where owners, or ‘hosts’, are encouraged to provide all sorts of…
There are periodically so many discussions and debates about laundry on balconies that the issue has it’s own section in the Flat Chat Forum. But it’s not the sight of…
This week in the Podcast we look at the Mascot Tower story and the apparently generous offer by Fair Trading to bankroll emergency accommodation for residents. They are saying it’s…
The advice from Owners Corporation Network spokesman Stephen Goddard could not have been more blunt: Don’t buy apartments off the plan. His actual words in an opinion piece in the…
Victorian apartment residents have at least another 20 months of disruption to deal with – probably more – according to a response we received from the Government there about any…
It’s been a while since we’ve had a forum post about a committee that’s gone “rogue” – making decisions without consulting other owners and awarding themselves all sorts of perks.…
For obvious reasons, our podcast this week is about the Mascot Tower crisis. We recorded the podcast before we were aware of the story in today’s Financial Review revealing that…
It’s hard to know exactly how to respond to the chaos at Mascot Towers. If you haven’t heard, last weekend hundreds of residents were forced to leave a South Sydney…