No sooner had we written about how paying levies is often the first thing to go when apartment owners are facing a cost-of-living crisis, than this story pops up on the ABC . It’s about a woman that got into so much debt that her owners corp eventually had her declared bankrupt. In today’s podcast, Paul Morton of Lannock Finance explains why that didn’t need to happen and what the owners corp could have done – at no cost to the scheme – to give the struggling home owner another way out. Also we ...
Aug 31, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 34
Flying (almost) solo this week, Jimmy looks at a Sydney Morning Herald story which reveals the posh areas in Sydney where you can upgrade your address without paying the multi-million dollar costs of buying a trophy house. Karen Stiles, EO of the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) reveals the line-up for the upcoming Strata Matters conference . And, as the backlash against his revelations of even more dodgy dealings in Queensland’s iniquitous caretaker manager contract system heats up, Jimmy admit...
Aug 23, 2023•21 min•Season 6Ep. 33
The podcast has an international flavour this week – and not just because co-host Sue dropped in just before she jetted off to Europe. Reports from Scotland suggest that build-to-rent apartments, one suggested solution to the housing shortage – and rent caps, one proposed solution to the cost-of-living crisis – don’t sit easily with each other. There are also reports from New York where Airbnb has sued the city for imposing rules on such trivialities as fire safety, over-crowding and building co...
Aug 16, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 32
We’re going interstate and all-ages this week but we start with a council on Sydney’s North Shore that has been served with a repair order for defects in a block in which they were co-developers. According to this story in the SMH , Lane Cove council is finding out the hard way what happens when you get into bed with a developer who goes bust. After that we look at serious rumblings from Queensland where the government is trumpeting a plan to see 600,000 new apartments in the south-east corner o...
Aug 08, 2023•28 min•Season 6Ep. 31
It’s very much a mixed bag in this week’s podcast, not least because what’s good news for some in property prices is, inevitably, bad news for others. But first, we have a chat about embedded networks, what they are and how apartment buyers get tricked into paying for things that should be charged to developers. And, with mainstream property media finally catching up – we first raised this issue a couple of years ago – we suggest a way apartment buyers can get around these scandalous rorts. Then...
Aug 02, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 30
This week we look at two apartment blocks that it’s pretty safe to say are at the opposite ends of the social spectrum. The first is a Housing Commission block that has just won the NSW Premier’s architecture award, stimulating serious high-rise envy and which could be an antidote to Nimbyism as well as the new form of property selfishness, ANTE …“And Not There Either”. (We call it ANOTE in the podcast, but, hey, it’s new to us too!) At the other end of the scale, there’s the block being built i...
Jul 26, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 29
This week we look at why so many strata disputes are getting stuck between NSW Fair Trading's mediators and NCAT's tribunal adjudicators - maybe it's because they don't talk to each other. And maybe it's because some disputes are between right and wrong and compulsory mediation can be a big fat waste of time. As if that weren't bad enough, NCAT doesn't even communicate internally. Why else would a strata manager sacked from not one but two large buildings be given total control - with no owner i...
Jul 19, 2023•31 min•Season 6Ep. 28
There’s only one story in strata this week – Toplace, the developer of the benighted Vicinity building, went into receivership , leaving owners with an estimated bill of between $50m and $100m to rescue the sagging high-rise. Sue and to a lesser extent the Flat Chat website has been following this saga from day one. And it has a lot of moving parts, reading more like crime story than a property yarn. There are disgraced politicians, anonymous death threats, absconding directors, fist fights at s...
Jul 12, 2023•30 min•Season 6Ep. 27
Whether you love or loathe Airbnb, you have to admit its founder, Brian Chesky, is a pretty smart guy. Anyone who can parlay an idea to rent an airbed in a spare room into an $80 billion industry has to have more than good luck going for him. So when he starts promoting a shift back to people welcoming travellers into spare rooms in their homes – rather than letting whole homes to complete strangers – you have to assume there’s something afoot. There’s a “perfect storm” brewing in the holiday an...
Jul 06, 2023•22 min•Season 6Ep. 26
Last week we discussed the new report from the NSW Office of the Building Commissioner – they’re calling it a case study – titled “Broken Promises, Blame Games and Balconies”. It’s a big document but essential reading for anyone in an apartment block that’s about to pursue a claim for defects or is concerned about the way the whole housing industry is going (or not). The case study follows, in granular detail, the trail of disastrous attempts at defect rectification at the Otto 2 building in Ros...
Jun 28, 2023•43 min•Season 6Ep. 25
When NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler commissioned a case study into what happened when serious defects were discovered in a new block's balconies, it revealed a trail of denials, delays, obfuscation and bloody mindedness. That deeply flawed process just to see residents being allowed to step out on to their balconies cost the owners and developers a combined total of more than $2 million in legal fees, and still didn't get the problem fixed (at least in the short term). Needless to say,...
Jun 22, 2023•27 min•Season 6Ep. 24
This week we bring you the second part of Strata Lawyer David Bannerman's Q&A session with Flat Chat's Jimmy Thomson asking the questions sent by Flat Chat readers and Bannerman Lawyers' clients. This week the topics include: Reclassifying common property in community schemes (to avoid paying levies); Fraud on the minority; Cost recovery by-laws to deter action by owners; Breaches of property development deeds; By-laws about drying laundry on balconies; Renter's objection to renovation; Bank...
Jun 13, 2023•25 min•Season 6Ep. 23
There’s a change of pace in the Flat Chat Wrap this week as we replay the first 30 minutes of our online chat with leading strata lawyer David Bannerman. Jimmy was invited on to his podcast channel to fire questions at him in a session he calls “Lawyer in the Hot Seat". In the first 30 minutes we covered topics as diverse as the Design and Building Practitioners Act, new building defects, retaining walls, by-law disputes, how to deal with a nuisance “keyboard warrior” and combustible cladding. I...
Jun 07, 2023•30 min•Season 6Ep. 22
The housing crisis is still uppermost in many minds but there's a new twist with a former Mirvac boss, now an advisor to the government, telling the Prime Minister to do something he knows is right but is political poison. Then there's a new way of investing in rental properties without becoming an evil landlord (or lady). Airbnb founder Brian Chesky "airbrushes" the global holiday letting monster, saying he wishes he'd never let it loose to take people's homes. (Pauses to sniff away a tear.) An...
May 31, 2023•21 min•Season 6Ep. 21
It seems we have a new culprit on whom to blame Australia’s housing shortage – Nimbys. Sue has collated a raft of newspaper articles here , here and here , all of which state or imply that the fault for not enough homes being built lies with local authorities who cave into their constituents’ demands not to have high-rise buildings in their burbs. Look, there are many factors that have led to the current lack of housing and the subsequent soaring rents in Australia, but there is no one, single c...
May 24, 2023•20 min•Season 6Ep. 20
There’s a different sound to the Flat Chat Wrap this week, Firstly it was recorded over Zoom, then Jimmy seems to have acquired hay fever in the south of France, the lavender-growing capital of the world. And then it’s been hastily edited on his laptop in between hikes, hotel moves and failing internet. But the show must go and and this week Jimmy and Sue talk about what difference (if any) last week’s budget meant to the housing crisis,. There's the Sydney council that wants to tax owners who l...
May 19, 2023•22 min•Season 6Ep. 19
It's a mixed bag in the podcast this week - but there's a lot of doom and gloom about. We have the Reserve Bank threatening more interest rate rises (to try to get us to keep our credit cards in our wallets). There's a story in a Sydney paper that investors could be paying $17,000 a month AFTER they've collected their rent on their property, thanks to interest rate rises. There's (our) concerns that a fire in an apartment building garage, which caused the block to be evacuated, will spark unfoun...
May 08, 2023•21 min•Season 6Ep. 18
If you’ve ever wondered whether you really need to set aside funds or organise a loan for future lift repairs or replacement, try getting stuck in one for half an hour. Jimmy tells of his brief incarceration (and escape) in this week’s podcast and he and Sue discuss maintaining old lifts and even adding new ones to older buildings. But first they look at property prices, with the latest figures suggesting there may already have been a soft landing. That’s good news for apartment owners and even ...
May 01, 2023•34 min•Season 6Ep. 17
With the media dominated by the passing last week of Barry Humphries and Fr Bob Maguire, our Artificial Intelligence first-rough transcriptions service managed to conflate our brief tributes to both and come up with Barry McGuire. Boomers may recall that that Barry was the singer of the Dylanesque Eve of Destruction, back in 1965. Although we will miss our Barry and Bob, both giants in their fields, it’s not quite that bad. Or is it? In any case Sue spent a large chunk of last week remembering h...
Apr 25, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 16
We wander down some well-trodden tracks in this week’s podcast, but there are a few twists and turns to keep you on your toes. We dissect the arguments in a long missive from Airbnb about why it’s not their fault that there’s a housing crisis. The basic flaw in their argument – we need to build more homes (true) - is that building homes takes years but banning short-term lets could put more than 60,000 houses and apartments back on the market overnight. We look at the benighted Aurora building i...
Apr 17, 2023•27 min•Season 6Ep. 15
There’s been a lot happening behind the scenes in Strataland over Easter. For a start, there’s the latest astonishing figures on booming rent rises across Australia. Is it any surprise that the area with the lowest rent rises just happens to be the one with the only rent caps in the country? You awake, Chris Minns? Speaking of whom, NSW has a new Fair Trading Minister, Anoulack Chanthivong, and with all respect to cultural differences, you have to wonder how long it will be before his name is di...
Apr 12, 2023•26 min•Season 6Ep. 14
Queensland held a round table about housing and homelessness recently as the Sunshine State faces a similar crisis to the rest of Australia when it comes to a shortage of housing – including apartments – and a lack of available rentals. We pick the bones out of the proposal to limit rent rises to once a year and the dismissal of other radical reforms that were proposed. You can read the ABC news report on the Queensland proposals HERE and the report on the original summit HERE . Meanwhile, skipp...
Apr 04, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 13
Ah, the perils of trusting poll predictions immediately after an election. While Labor have definitely won and Chris Minns is definitely the new Premier of NSW, the balance of power is still in doubt (at time of writing). Does that mean that the Greens have regained considerable influence – something that we say in the podcast has slipped through their fingers? Apparently not. A couple of independents have spiked their guns on that front. In any case, the basic issues we take up in the podcast r...
Mar 27, 2023•33 min•Season 6Ep. 12
This week sees us return to familiar ground both geographically and in terms of our topic as we take a look at an SBS Dateline episode set in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. Five years ago, Jimmy was in Edinburgh and was interviewed for the Scottish edition of the Times newspaper (see above), warning the city that it faced a rental crisis if it didn’t curb Airbnb and other short term letting agencies that were moving into residential apartments. Now, rental availability has plummeted and rents h...
Mar 21, 2023•24 min•Season 6Ep. 11
It seems as if every time we look away from Victoria, some thing new and awful happens in that state’s strata system. If it wasn’t the best buildings in Melbourne being handed over wholesale to Airbnb, with no meaningful restrictions, it was the cladding fires, then the cladding remediations revealing buildings that were rotting from the inside and now we have the Aurora shambles. This week in the Flat Chat Wrap, we pick the bones out of the fiasco surrounding Melbourne’s third-highest apartment...
Mar 14, 2023•22 min•Season 6Ep. 10
This week’s podcast may have an international flavour – Jimmy is in Scotland and Sue in Sydney -- but it covers familiar territory. First up we talk about a campaign to bring NSW’s rental laws into line with Victoria’s where landlords may not unreasonably refuse a request by a tenant to bring a pet into their property. Given that both states now have strata laws that mean schemes can’t impose blanket bans on pets, could it mean an open-door policy for pets in apartments? It will be interesting t...
Mar 07, 2023•28 min•Season 6Ep. 9
We are all used to being told that we only own the air inside our apartments’ walls, although not the walls themselves, depending on which uniquely quirky set of strata laws you live under. But how about owning the air above your apartment block? Or even the apartment block next door? What would you do with it? Whay would you need it? And what if the developer has already sold it to someone else. Also this week we look at the NSW government’s crackdown on embedded networks – and we start by expl...
Feb 28, 2023•27 min•Season 6Ep. 8
No sooner had we said last week that Queensland needed to look at their “collective sales” laws – allowing a super majority of owners to compel the minority to sell their units – than the state government there announced that’s exactly what they plan to do. The precise process for this remains to be thrashed out in parliamentary committeesn, but you are dealing with a community that values – possibly over-values – property owners’ rights to do what they want with the home that they own (unless, ...
Feb 21, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 7
This week we offer you a podcast with all the bells and whistles – more accurately, it’s drums and gongs, as we take a brief detour to listen in on the community group that hilariously drowned out Sue’s latest talk on her books. On more serious issues, this week’s Podcast covers three contentious areas of apartment living and the first two concern apartment blocks that have been rendered uninhabitable – although for very different reasons. First up, we look at a block in Queensland which has suf...
Feb 14, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 6
There’s some good news and some possibly calamitous bad news in this week’s podcast. Firstly, the number of apartment building approvals was up by more than 50 per cent in December, month on month. Then a major league developer has told state governments they need to make much more of an effort on affordable and build-to-rent apartments. But all of that is in the future. Right now, tens of thousands of Chinese university students have been told they need to get back to in-person tuition. That me...
Feb 07, 2023•23 min•Season 6Ep. 5
