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 than can be insured – anything three storeys or under or any work costing $20,000 or over – how may def...
Apr 27, 2021•22 min
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 Better Regulation Minister Matt Kean were about to announce new NSW short-term letting regulations that would...
Apr 20, 2021•28 min
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 in strata – parking and defects.However, our chat about the now-shelved short-term rentals code of conduct...
Apr 17, 2021•26 min
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 owners not have the right to end their tenancy leases when they want to? Why should they need to prove t...
Apr 06, 2021•26 min
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 this project on the podcast where we also caught up with architects Tina Engelen who co-designed another...
Mar 30, 2021•24 min
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 seriously defective and with no legal approvals.Listen hereThen there’s the local council that’s telli...
Mar 23, 2021•25 min
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 missing those moments of splendid isolation on your bike, bus or train that transport you mentally into work m...
Mar 16, 2021•21 min
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-only block (maybe that's why they call it NCAT).And the Tribunal Member decrees the recent Court of Appea...
Mar 09, 2021•28 min
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 might be.Listen HereThen we turn our gazes south to Victoria where their new strata laws have just passe...
Mar 02, 2021•22 min
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 question about whether or not there was a guide to the best dogs for apartments.Listen Here“Oh, yes,”...
Feb 23, 2021•26 min
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 if it was detrimental to the animal.Listen HereThe amended Bill, which was approved by the Upper House ...
Feb 16, 2021•23 min
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 the hope they sharpen up their ideas to get good renters.You can find links to the petition here.List...
Feb 09, 2021•20 min
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 wander down the odd tangent, our chat will never meander.We’re aiming for somewhere between 20 and 25 minu...
Feb 01, 2021•23 min
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 living in apartments in Sydney, rather than who is presented on the glossy sales brochures.We are not ...
Jan 11, 2021•30 min
This week’s podcast may be the first of 2021 but 2020 doesn’t get away that easily.Last year will be remembered in global politics as the year of Brexit, Trump, the Covid-19 Pandemic, and the Trump-rump. Democracy in the USA is hanging by a thread but it will survive.Talking about democracy, on a much more local level, we look back at the battle over “no-pets” by-laws and how it tore apart two apartment blocks, and made NCAT look pretty foolish too.Listen HereInevitably, we examine the entrails ...
Jan 04, 2021•41 min
OK, stop, relax, breathe. We’re not taking a break these holidays so much as easing our collective foot off the gasWe thought that, rather than drag someone out of their post-Christmas coma to be interviewed on the Flat Chat Wrap podcast, we’d give you a chance to reprise some of our most listened-to episodes of the past year, some of which you might have missed or want to hear again.In fact there are two “normal” episodes that stand out as our most downloaded. Episode 91 – Crackdown on Dud Deve...
Dec 29, 2020•23 min
With Christmas rapidly approaching and Covid-19 closing in on us again, we thought about not doing a full podcast this week.A quick intro and replay of Jimmy’s most recent stint on the James Valentine’s afternoons on ABC Radio 702, and that ws going to be it.But once we got chatting, all sorts of topic came up, such as, what is this obsession with toilet roll every time there’s a hint of trouble on the horizon?Why do some people “need” to have 10 times as much as they could possibly use outside ...
Dec 22, 2020•46 min
It’s very much a tale of two slices of strata in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast. To begin with, you can listen to two over-privileged, entitled professionals (us) whingeing about what went wrong … and right … when we decided to renovate both bathrooms in our flat at once.BOTH bathrooms? “When I was a lad we had a pothole in the road, and used gravel for toilet paper …” says one of Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen.Listen HereRegular readers of this website will have been following our reno (mis)ad...
Dec 15, 2020•36 min
In this week’s podcast we catch up with what’s happening at Mascot Towers as owners in the ill-starred building prepare for their day in court.Specifically, they will be pursuing legal action against the developers of the apartment block next door, construction of which, they claim, undermined the foundations of their block.Meanwhile they are facing tens of millions of dollars in defect rectification bills to the point where the repairs may cost more than the block is worth.And the people next d...
Dec 08, 2020•45 min
We turn back the clock – but just a little – for this week’s podcast when we look at the weirdest and wackiest questions asked and problems presented on the Flat Chat Forum in recent months.And we have a long chat with Kathlyn Loseby, President of the NSW chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects as well as COO of Crone Architects.She’ll be talking about the importance of good architecture – and what architects can bring to a building that no other professional can.Listen HereFirst up, t...
Dec 01, 2020•52 min
With most of the worst of the pandemic behind us here in Australia – or, at least, the first and hopefully the last wave of infections – we thought we’d take a few moments in the podcast to discuss positives that have emerged from the months of lockdown and working from home.Apparently, according to a Zoom conference that Sue sat in on (and that’s a great leap forward, right there), technology has advance by five years in the past five months, including having your apartment block’s or office’s ...
Nov 24, 2020•46 min
There are two major strands to this week’s podcast.The first stems from a question raised in the Flat Chat Forum, about an apartment owner who wants to install a stairlift – one of those seats that trundles up a staircase – in a narrow common property stairwell.It's for his elderly mother, so you have some sympathy, as you'd have for the other owners who had to squeeze past the rail every day.Listen HereNow the plusses and (many) minuses of this proposal are thrashed out in the Forum but here in...
Nov 17, 2020•37 min
We’ve scored a century! This week sees us post the 100th episode of the Flat Chat Wrap – and that's only counting properly produced and distributed episodes.We would have held a giant dance party to celebrate but, hey, what with Covid-19 and social distancing and all, we might limit it to a chocolate croissant with our morning coffee.Now, before we go any further with the self-congratulation, this week’s podcast, available here, is mostly about how you can turn an inaccessible old walk-up apartm...
Nov 17, 2020•23 min
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 day last weekend and we went down to have a look and chat to … well, anyone who was interested in talking to us.You can hear the results of that in the podcast (or read the transcript at the end) but this build-to-rent block does seem to be a game-changer, although it’s not for everyone.[Powerpress]Why not? Well, it’s between 1...
Nov 10, 2020•51 min
We are looking at two very different kinds of rentals this week. The first is build-to-rent apartments (which is definitely NOT affordable housing, regardless of what anyone else might tell you).The other is short-term holiday rentals which are routinely and often erroneously called Airbnb. That's the generic term but, in fact, we will be talking to Stayz, their biggest rivals in Australia.Listen HereBuild-to-rent is a new concept for Australia – the first in the country is having it’s inaugural...
Nov 03, 2020•51 min
It’s renovations all the way in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap as we chat about a Forum post asking what can be done about a disastrous and unauthorised renovation, now that the owner is planning to sell, bodgy renos included.That’s one end of the spectrum where a major and mostly illegal renovation has been allowed to continue without so much as a “by your leave” let alone a by-law.At the other end of the reno rainbow, an old chum has called up to ask about the work she wants to do in her flat wher...
Oct 27, 2020•45 min
People who don't care about pets in apartments shouldn't switch off just yet, regardless of how bored you are with the whole issue.It has implications for everyone in apartments, whether you have pets or not, as you may discover when your upstairs neighbour starts stomping around on their new, cheap timber floor. Letting ourselves off the leash this week, we also explore why Sydney's rents are going down a lot in some areas but up even more in others.Listen HereAnd we look at the fuel of the fut...
Oct 20, 2020•36 min
The big strata news of this week stopped us in our tracks. The NSW Court of Appeals has overturned a decision by the strata tribunal (NCAT) which, earlier this year, ruled that strata schemes could create "no pets" by-laws.Just to be clear, NCAT last year twice ruled that no-pet by-laws were illegal, then the NCAT Appeals Board overturned those decisions, then the Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, overturned the Appeals Board decision. So now, in short, NSW strata schemes can't b...
Oct 13, 2020•47 min
It’s a bit of a Budget special on Flat Chat this week, if only because we are talking about money.Specifically we are discussing the personal taxes that you probably didn’t even know you are supposed to pay when your strata scheme starts making a profit. And we'll discuss where to get dough when your strata schemes needs a lot of it in a hurry.To which end, we have a chat with Paul Morton, CEO of our long-time sponsors Lannock Finance. Along the way we’ll touch on why the Australian Tax Office w...
Oct 06, 2020•45 min
This week's podcast is all about wheel-clamping, email privacy and the amazing legacy of the Sydney Olympics athletes' village.But one of the biggest pieces of news this week is about the podcast itself or, more to the point, these show notes.As we approach our 100th edition, and following numerous requests from readers who don't listen to podcasts, we have finally discovered a program that will use Artificial Intelligence to transcribe the audio into text.Now, AI can only do so much with variat...
Sep 29, 2020•44 min
