The issue we raised last week rumbles on with experienced waterproofers claiming they are being driven out of the industry in NSW while engineers and builders line up to take sides. We can see why there was a need to tighten the regulations but if it ends up with competent operators being forced out of the industry, leading to strata schemes not being able to fix their common property or, even worse, going to the "dark side" to get things done, what's really been gained? And we take a look at Qu...
Jan 30, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 4
This week we look at how one of the greatest conveniences in apartment blocks could be not only costing you money but undermining efforts at recycling. The humble garbage chute can be a major pain in the wallet if it’s misused, and a threat to recycling if residents chose to drop rather than sort. We have advice for a radio superstar who’s having to move out of her home because of paparazzi pests. We hear about a builder whose ready to retire because the laws brought in to clear the cowboys out ...
Jan 23, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 3
We all know there’s a housing shortage and we are seeing signs of overseas workers and students coming back to our cities, so it should be no surprise that rents are going up. Yup, that old supply and demand equation never fails. But the surprise part of all this is how rents on apartments are going up by so much more than on houses. We kick that around with some astonishing figure on this week’s Flat Chat Wrap – especially looking at some unexpected areas where unit rents have soared. Then we l...
Jan 17, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 2
A couple of issues popped on to the Flat Chat radar while we were off being festive.One was all about smoking on balconies which, if that wasn’t serious enough, raised the spectre of barbecues being banned from apartment blocks.Is the threat real and would anyone care? Or could we expect to see Sam Kekovich leading a protest march on state parliaments to deter our politicians from making any such unAustralian decisions.While we’re on the subject of threats to democracy (he says, drawing an extre...
Jan 09, 2023•23 min
OK, I admit it – we’ve been in holiday mode. Could we have cobbled together a podcast on Sunday morning after New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay, as we call it in “ma hoose”)? Maybe. Would it have been uplifting, entertaining and enlightening? Maybe not so much.However, we will be back, renewed and recharged next week when we will have plenty to talk about, starting with the 15-month battle it took for a couple to get the Tribunal (NCAT) just to follow the law on tobacco smoke drift.And we’ll get into ...
Jan 03, 2023•23 min
In this our last Flat Chat Wrap podcast of the year, we kick the tyres of a couple of issues that will have consequences throughout strata. Or will they?And we suggest some holiday viewing aimed solidly at apartment dwellers.Given that half the residents of our strata schemes are renters, recent changes in the law could impact on a lot of people living in and owning apartments and townhouses.The first is the NSW government’s decision to fall into line with Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania and b...
Dec 20, 2022•26 min
What a relief! With Sue back in the podcast saddle, and now that we are very much in holiday season, we can lighten the mood a little – especially since we have just registered our 50,000th download.But first we talk about a block that has a limit on home swaps, where overseas owners exchange homes for a couple of weeks at a time. The restriction may have been legal a couple of years ago but, under NSW Airbnb laws, probably isn’t now.Will the block change its by-law or wait until someone challen...
Dec 12, 2022•29 min
OK, I admit it, I’m becoming obsessed with what is happening – or not happening – in Victoria. And I mean Victoria, Australia, not the capital of British Columbia, as the advertising bot on our podcast provider seems to think.Apologies if last week’s podcast started with a noisy ad for Canadian radio. This is what happens when artificial intelligence turns out to be not as smart as it thinks it is.No, I’m talking about our Victoria where I get a strong sense that strata there is in crisis – and ...
Dec 06, 2022•23 min
This week’s podcast is short but not very sweet (despite it being our 200th). Sue is away in the UK, which allows me to vent about a couple of issues that have been bugging me.They are not particularly new – it’s just I’ve been irked by new examples.The first is based on a post to the Forum which details how a small-scale developer and his family have cynically and meticulously manipulated the votes in their strata scheme.Firstly they inflated their voting power to elect themselves as the commit...
Nov 29, 2022•19 min
Are you feeling under-exposed and ill-informed? That may be because the much-vaunted NSW strata data Hub doesn’t tell anyone who doesn’t already know stuff very much about your apartment blocks at all.We take a look at the information available on the Hub to non-residents (not much) and residents (not much more) and what’s in the “coming soon” section (ditto).Which prompts the question – if having strata information on the Hub is a good idea, why isn’t there more of it. What’s so sensitive about...
Nov 22, 2022•23 min
It’s a longer than usual podcast this week so strap yourselves in. Firstly we look at the Owners Corporation Network’s (OCN) 10-point manifesto which they have announced leading up to next year’s NSW state election.It’s part wish-list and part statement of intent and you can read it in detail here. What we discuss is why those demands are there and what it might mean if they are taken up by the next state government (whoever that might be).Then we dive into the foaming waters of Bondi Beach wher...
Nov 15, 2022•55 min
There’s a little bit of everything in this week’s podcast. We start with a story about how people who either ignore or don't know by-laws and regulations (not to mention common sense and personal responsibility), can get their come-uppance.And then we slide into the second part of the Lawyer in the Hot Seat webinar with David Bannerman.But first we bring you the story of a person who really should have known better, who laid down a timber floor which, in its design, could not have been noisier i...
Nov 08, 2022•38 min
I know we already have two posts up on the website but we couldn’t let the news that an insurer is going to offer a 10-year warranty on new apartment blocks pass without comment.This is a huge deal for apartment buildings in NSW and, you would have to think, for the rest of Australia too (if their state governments can get over their instinctive and deep-seated contempt for apartment owners and residents).This is exactly what Building Commissioner David Chandler set out to achieve – get the trus...
Nov 01, 2022•34 min
Co-podder Sue Williams and I took ourselves off to the Owners Corporation Network’s 20th anniversary event last week and it turned out to be a very revealing evening indeed.OK, the plaudits and praise were flowing faster than the free wine – and that’s saying something. I hosted and Sue delivered a fascinating speech about how the OCN was formed in the darkest days of battle against corrupt developers, their sleazy managers, our supine strata committee and our incompetent strata managers.We thou...
Oct 25, 2022•26 min
Can you imagine that you simply want to exercise your rights to have your defects fixed and a representative from the developer bails you up in the street and tells you people have been killed for less.Or your chair was in cahoots with the developer and agreed to an $80,000 pay-off for $3million worth of defects?Or your strata manager was so incompetent that he put the strata scheme’s legally binding seal on a contract that had been changed by the developer to say that you would pay the wages of...
Oct 18, 2022•23 min
Surprise, surprise! What started off looking like a barren day on the pod-front, right at the end of the school holidays, turned out to give us a lot to talk about.First of all, there was the fact that apartment rents are rising three times faster than house rents, and what that could mean for inner cities with both tourists and overseas students on their way back in droves.We also touch on the implications of that and what our various governments could and should be doing about all that in this...
Oct 11, 2022•27 min
This week on the Flat Chat website we celebrate the launch of Sue's new book about spray-on skin pioneer, Professor Fiona Wood.What's the link with strata? Well, if there ever was a cladding fire and someone was badly burned and ... em ... OK, Sue's the link. Forgive us for indulging in a little self-promotion.Elsewhere on the pod, we take a closer look at the much-vaunted (by us if no one else) iCIRT star ratings for developers and come away a little disappointed.Basically, if a developer gets ...
Oct 04, 2022•21 min
This week’s podcast is mostly (but not entirely) focussed on an announcement we believe is going to change the way we buy apartments in NSW and probably across Australia.Last week NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler announced the first four developers in NSW to achieve more than four out of five gold stars from the state’s revolutionary Independent Construction Industry Rating Tool (iCIRT).And in a speech to the Toga group - recipients of one of the 4.5 ratings – he said that NSW apartment ...
Sep 27, 2022•35 min
OK, it’s our stupid fault for crossing the ditch to New Zealand without taking even our basic recording gear.We could have just about coped and recorded it on our return but our flight was delayed by an hour and a half and that mean that not only would we be later than planned in getting back to Sydney but we’d be tired and grumpy too.Then I discovered my phone has an “interview” setting in its voice recorder app and all we had to do was talk into opposite ends of the Samsung to get a reasonably...
Sep 20, 2022•23 min
If NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler has served no other function, he earns our respect and gratitude for being a very useful source of entertaining, informative and occasionally horrifying stories.The latest, from a parliamentary committee meeting, involves an allegation that development company’s executives had tried to smear him with a suggestion that he had demanded a $5million bribe to back off from a development where he’d banned sales until defects were fixed.We pick the bones out ...
Sep 13, 2022•23 min
It’s hardly a true crime podcast but this week, inspired by connections made in the press between the relatives of property developers and their friends with police records, we wade into the murky waters of past cases where the Venn diagrams of criminals and property developers have overlapped.It should be no surprise to anyone that the high-risk, high rewards ventures like unregulated property development and criminal activities would have attracted similar kinds of characters.But whatever’s go...
Sep 06, 2022•25 min
Look, we know it’s all done and dusted. David Chandler has re-extended his contract as NSW Building Commissioner, John Minns is back as Property Services Commissioner and Victor Dominello has returned as Fair Trading Minister (for now).In short, the band is back together and former Fair Trading Minister Eleni Petinos - the Yoko Ono of the strata Beatles – has retreated to Miranda where her skills and character are more fully appreciated.However, we can’t let it lie. Premier Perrottet insists, El...
Aug 30, 2022•27 min
In this week’s podcast we are going to discuss the local council that’s going to pay someone $100,000 a year to help residents fight high rise developments.It’s the least developed suburb in Sydney, so do they really need someone to take up cudgels against developers? According to this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, the move was triggered by a proposal – approved by the NSW's Eastern City Planning Panel – to knock down four terraces and build two 10-storey residential “towers” at the corner...
Aug 23, 2022•27 min
We are in a state of shock here at Flat Chat, wondering if, when David Chandler and Victor Dominello both go, and with dodgy developers already circling the bleeding carcass of Fair Trading like vultures, are we going to be back to the bad old days of seriously defective apartment blocks being the norm?We had no idea when we recorded this podcast that Victor Dominello was about to announce his resignation. NSW Fair Trading is obviously spying on us. We reached this conclusion after weeks of reco...
Aug 18, 2022•27 min
If there is one area of NSW Liberal politics that may be glad that the kerfuffle over the appointment of a trade envoy to New York is drawing so much media attention and political heat, it will be anyone associated with Fair Trading.When we sat down to record this week’s podcast and discuss – among other things – the departure of Property Services Commissioner John Minns, we had no idea how chaotic things had become there.To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one commissioner is unfortunate, to lose ...
Aug 09, 2022•28 min
There we were, all set with a podcast on David Chandler’s resignation in the can, when we heard that NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet had invited Fair Trading Minister Eleni Petinos to leave at her own chosen speed (one for the Dylan fans, there).Now, we could have fudged it with a new intro but Big Dave’s not-very-imminent departure was already old news and the vapour trail from Ms Petinos' expensive fragrance was still lingering from her exit, so it was back in the bunker for a re-take.And, full ...
Aug 02, 2022•24 min
Sometimes we are just too efficient for our own good. No sooner had we sent this week’s podcast off for transcription than the news broke that NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler had announced he will be leaving the job in November – just weeks after he signed a year-long extension to his contract.We’ve covered that in detail HERE and will pick up on the news for next week’s podcast.Meanwhile, there’s plenty to talk about this week, including the TV report that they have discovered that apa...
Jul 26, 2022•31 min
Last week saw the publication of a confected scandal of an elderly couple who’d been given bad advice, blaming their owners corporation for a special levy of $18,000 that had blown out to a debt of $44,000.As we pointed out in this story, and on this podcast, the owners corp were probably just fulfilling their legal obligation to fix common property and charge owners according to their unit entitlements.But the appallingly one-sided yarn glossed over the influence of the financial and legal advi...
Jul 18, 2022•29 min
This week on the podcast we hop into the highly dubious story that appeared in the Sydney Sun-Herald this week about a poor old couple who are facing bankruptcy because of a special levy imposed on their block by a heartless and cruel strata committee …Hang on! Heartless and cruel? Strata committees can’t set special levies. And owners corporations have to maintain and repair common property.The block is 50 years old – has nobody been putting money in the sinking fund? (Rhetorical question – don...
Jul 12, 2022•26 min
This week’s Flat Chat Wrap has a look at something we predicted a few weeks ago – that the knives would soon be out for Building Commissioner David Chandler, just as they were all those years ago for Police Commissioner Peter Ryan.Why? Maybe because he's been a bit too successful at doing exactly what he was asked to do - get rid of of a crooks and shonks in the property development industry. Those crooks and shonks didn't get where they are today without having friends in high places ... and th...
Jul 05, 2022•25 min
