Podcast: New pet laws and defining ‘reasonable’
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…
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Finding homes for strata’s invisible 25 per cent
Who do you think lives in apartments in our big cities? Are most other apartment dwellers just like you or are you somehow different from the mob? Based on a…
Forum: Landlady dives in before tenant has left
When does a residential lease end? According to the standard lease (in Victoria) it’s on the date when the lease expires, unless a different arrangement is agreed. According to Tenants…
Rents drop as Airbnb flats return to residential lets
The pandemic hasn’t quite killed off short-term holiday letting but it’s certainly applied a hefty brake – at least as far as our cities are concerned. The return to the…
Rental as anything – new app by-passes agents
New research has revealed that both tenants and landlords believe unhelpful real estate agents are among the biggest obstacles to their happy co-existence. Research commissioned by the founders of a…
Podcast 99: Long-term rental will tempt tenants
This week we returned to a topic we raised in the last podcast, namely build-to-rent and specifically the new Liv Indigo building at Sydney Olympic Park. They held an open…
Rents rollercoaster as Airbnbs abandoned
Rents in Sydney’s suburbs have been on a rollercoaster for the past few months, with the obvious culprit being the Covid-19 pandemic and all its side-effects. But while some areas…
Loneliness of the high rise residents left behind
Is there such a thing as “undercrowding”? There may well be with the centres of some of our biggest cities turning into ghost towns as Covid-19 restrictions bite, workers flee…
New rules on rent relief and evictions announced
Since at least half of the residents in strata are renters (meaning about half of the properties are owned by landlords) the recent announcements about the moratorium on evictions and…
Podcast 64: New rent laws but same old story with point-scoring pollies
In this week’s Podcast, Jimmy and Sue examine the plusses and minuses in the new NSW rental laws, which tilt things in tenants’ favour but don’t go all the way.…
From the Forum: Landlady too nice for her own good
There are times when I think some of our Flatchatters are just too nice for their own good. Take this week’s first correspondent whose tenant has been illegally parking his…
From the Forum: Treasurer pumping cash for dubious rent of space
There are times when strata committee office-bearers get themselves into trouble for no good reason, like simply failing to keep their paperwork up to date. And there are others when…
Smoke alarm and rent rise shocks in Airbnb lets
Smoke alarms that either don’t exist or are covered up, higher rents for permanent residents and a new service that helps hosts find somewhere to stay when they are renting…
Flat Chat Wrap #4 – Homeless on common property & build-to-rent in the USA
Homeless people sleeping in common property and – a world away – what it’s like to live in a ‘build-to-rent’ apartment in the USA. The Flat Chat Wrap takes an…
When you can sue over loss of rent due to renos
We’ve had a lot of discussion recently about whether or not owners can claim compensation for things like loss of rent when renovations – either by individual owners or by…
Live where you love, buy where you can afford
There are few feelings of financial disappointment greater than scrimping and saving (not to mention begging and borrowing) for a deposit only to see the prospects of living where you…
Rental data reveals … not a lot, really
Here at Flat Chat we are all in favour of transparency and freely available information. But we’ re scratching our heads at the latest step in that direction by the…
New options put renters first in housing affordability
There are two new buzz-phrases in the housing affordability lexicon – ‘build-to-rent’ and ‘rent-to-own’. Build-to-rent and rent-to-own are at opposite ends of the housing culture spectrum but both are being…