Forum: Window repair costs don’t add up
This week a Flatchatter doesn’t understand how her share of the cost of having all the windows in her building repaired is more that the quote she received for having…
questions
Forum: Cheap insurance leaves owner under water
There an annoying piece of nonsense that repeatedly comes up in strata – and nobody ever seems to learn. What happens is that there’s a fault in common property that…
Forum: At wits’ end with nasty neighbour campaign
There’s a smorgasbord of strata strife in this week’s forum but the story that stands out for me is the tenant who’s being targeted by a couple of owners who…
Forum: Sub-committees subterfuge and secrets
Imagine, you are sitting in on a strata committee meeting, unable to speak, and the chair gets to an agenda item that says something vague like “Parking Sub-committee”. The chair…
Forum: Inundated – just like the people below balcony window washers
One should never assume anything. I had thought that with so many people working from home, the correspondence to the Forum would take off like a rocket. When it just…
From the Forum – down in the dumps with a slack SM
We live in strange times indeed, and this week we received one of the longest posts to the Forum that I have ever seen. The main topic? A strata manager…
From the Forum – is working from home legal?
With more of us working from home, a fairly obvious question has been raised – is it legal? And the answer is … probably yes, possibly no. The critical issue,…
From the Forum: Money, money, money … or not
Unsurprisingly, finances are on a lot of people’s minds these days, whether it’s levies or rent and what you do when you can’t afford to pay. And then, of course…
Burning issue – OCN seminar on new fire regs
There are few phrases that send more of a chill thorough the hearts of strata owners than the words “fire safety”. Whether you’re in an old building badly in need…
From the Forum: Strata manager charges have 10 pages of “extras”
Your strata scheme is in disarray, the strata manager doesn’t know what they’re doing (or doesn’t care … or both). There hasn’t been a committee election for years and nobody…
From the Forum – Ratings sites for blocks, managers and agents
There’s an idea that‘s been floating around for a while now, that we should have a ratings website for good and bad apartment blocks and/or strata managers and rental agents.…
Roundup: We’re back … with the odd hiccup
It’s been a tough week at Flat Chat Central. Our fabulous website developers (Liveby5) have been working overtime to fix a range of problems that have been increasingly causing irritating…
Flat Chat Wrap #8 – The crumbling Opal Tower and the whole defects disaster
JimmyT and Sue Williams ask the questions everyone else is avoiding, and provide the answers people need to hear, about the Opal Tower in Sydney and the whole defects disaster…
Roundup: Cladding and parking top your responses
Our invitation in our last newsletter for you to suggest new topics for us to write about brought a few suggestions. That’s not to say that there’s a shortage of…
Roundup: Your strata questions take the cake again
There’s so much going on in the website this week that having a Roundup at all seems like icing on a very big cake … or is it over-egging the…
Roundup: And the answer is … the Forum
Usually on the weekly Roundup, I start with a story that’s caught my eye or piqued my curiosity and then lead into the best of the questions on the Forum.…
Roundup: The buck doesn’t stop here … or there
I should really call this week’s roundup the “runaroundup”, considering the way various government departments have had me pinging around like a pinball. A couple of weeks ago, I asked…
Roundup: power brokers, smokers and slackers
Purely coincidentally, in a week where my column in the AFR was banging on about untrained volunteers running massive budgets in their blocks, while competent professionals are too busy to…