We’ve been catching up with all the strata stories that emerged while we were away – and there’s a lot of them, covering just about every aspect of apartment living. The plan to boost Sydney’s night time economy with 24/7 bar openings has alarmed well-heeled resident so Circular Quay (according to this video on the Sydney Morning Herald website). And there’s more angst over noisy gyms which we first highlighted in this podcast and Sue’s SMH story before we left for Europe. We discuss why strata ...
Nov 13, 2024•22 min•Season 7Ep. 45
Can you imagine paying $30,000 a night for a pad in London? Yes, that’s thirty thousand dollars, in case you thought it was a misprint. And this is in a city that has its share of homelessness and has had to introduce a 90-night limit on short-term holiday lets to combat the drain on residential properties caused by platforms like Airbnb and their ilk. Also in Britain, a government survey has revealed how many previously unidentified apartment blocks still have potentially fatal flammable claddi...
Nov 07, 2024•13 min•Season 7Ep. 44
Your intrepid Flat Chat team’s travels take them to London this week but that doesn’t mean they have lost touch with what’s happening in Australia. For a start a boost to funding for tenants’ supports agencies has been announced by the NSW state government. That will no doubt be very useful when the inevitable confusion arises from the raft of changes to tenancy laws, passed by state parliament last week, come into effect in the new year. That doesn’t just help tenants. As Jimmy says, if landlor...
Oct 30, 2024•24 min•Season 7Ep. 43
This week’s podcast comes to you from less-than-sunny Glasgow, which may explain the slightly different sound quality. But the chat is up to its usual standards as we speculate on what new Building Commissioner James Sherrard will bring to the job as he fills the substantial shoes recently vacated by the redoubtable David Chandler. Then we have a look at the recent revelations about Netstrata allegedly slipping old receipts and invoices into their strata schemes’ portals. This has led to some st...
Oct 24, 2024•23 min•Season 7Ep. 42
There are so many issues it strata that are “he said, she said” - or “they said, they said”, to put it in a more contemporary context – that the temptation to not take sides is sometimes overwhelming. But consider the plight of an owner on the first floor of a block who has a noisy commercial gym operating from 6am until after 7pm every weekday. Then add in the fact that most of her strata committee’s members live several floors away from the noise are undisturbed and therefore unperturbed. And,...
Oct 16, 2024•28 min•Season 7Ep. 41
There’s a lot of anger and frustration behind this week’s edition of the Flat Chat Wrap. The fury on display on a recent episode of A Current Affair on Nine is both clear and understandable. Prospective owners in the Sapphire apartments in Gosford on the Central Coast of NSW had been told to be ready to move in, only to discover that work has stopped on the near-complete block and there is no occupancy certificate. The developer has long ago gone into receivership and the Receiver says they don’...
Oct 10, 2024•31 min•Season 7Ep. 40
When it comes to getting your attention, there’s nothing quite like being warned that the latest innovation could put you out of business. Okay, we’ve heard it all before, but imagine if a friend was able to access a reliable response to a strata question instantly, wherever you happen to be. And we’re not talking technical, jargon-ridden geeky stuff. If you everyone was able to get an instant answer to a normal question, like what to do about an annoying but scary neighbour, that could put paid...
Oct 03, 2024•20 min•Season 7Ep. 39
It’s been a tough few months for strata managers, especially the good ones – and there are many of them – who have been trying to do the best they can for their customers while the industry as a whole has been exposed to strident and mostly valid criticism. The irony for the honest and decent players is that they have been copping the additional scrutiny and suspicions directed at the whole industry without reaping the financial benefits of their vertically integrated, conflicted and less scrupu...
Sep 25, 2024•31 min•Season 7Ep. 38
We start this week’s podcast by looking back at the previous episode which has broken all our records for regular downloads. It’s not surprising really, given that it was a chat with ABC TV Four Corners investigative reporter Linton Besser about how and why he pulled together the Strata Trap report. At more than 450 downloads after only a week, this one will run and run, as they say in showbiz. This week we look at another of strata’s big problems – defects – through the eyes of Acting Building ...
Sep 19, 2024•30 min•Season 7Ep. 37
We’re rolling the Wrap out a little early this week because it’s connected to the hottest topic in strata right now. Linton Besser, the reporter who brought you the Four Corners report T he Strata Trap on Monday, has come on to the podcast to answer our questions about what he’s found in the strata industry, not only in NSW, but across Australia. What questions? How about what piqued his interest in the story that led to the exposure of strata management firm Netstrata and the resignation of its...
Sep 11, 2024•29 min•Season 7Ep. 36
Are your cooking and heating appliances giving your kids asthma? This week in the Flat Chat Wrap, Sue talks about a story she’s been chasing where families have found that switching from gas to electricity for their heating and cooking appliances has seen their kids’ asthma disappear. As we head for net zero emissions and electricity becomes the affordable power source of choice, you might want to start checking your pots and pans to see if they work on induction stoves. Before that, with Spring...
Sep 05, 2024•24 min•Season 7Ep. 35
There’s been considerable speculation about NSW Strata Commissioner John Minns this week after the revelation on an ABC news report that he has retained a significant holding in a property management company, albeit through a family trust. Is it a serious problem for the man tasked with overseeing strata management (among other things), especially in the wake of the Netstrata scandal? Or is it just an unfortunate embarrassment at a time when NSW Fair Trading has launched new legislation intended...
Aug 29, 2024•28 min•Season 7Ep. 34
In this week’s podcast, we look at why a problem in a company title block .would have been much easier to resolve had the apartment been in a strata building. The story in the Sydney Morning Herald is about a 71-year-old woman who has had to move out of her home because of damp caused by faulty water pipes in common property. We explain why that problem could have been much more easily resolved had it been in strata. We also touch on the recent albeit modest recruitment drive in the Strata Commi...
Aug 22, 2024•25 min•Season 7Ep. 33
So the NSW Fair Trading Minister has revealed his law changes in the wake of the Netstrata scandal and they are, as one strata insider put it, like being slapped on the wrist with limp spaghetti. With the news hot off the printer, Jimmy jumped in with both feet to claim this is a pretty poor response to the revelation that apartment owners are being misled and ripped off by some of the people whose job it is to look after them. Admittedly, this was recorded before he got the response from Fair T...
Aug 15, 2024•24 min•Season 7Ep. 32
Having been to more conferences that they’ve had Ubereats deliveries – and with drawers full of lanyards to prove it – Jimmy and Sue headed off to the Gold Coast last week to the Strata Impact conference full of hope that this wouldn’t either be another whinge-fest (not least because JT was MC). In fact, it turned out to be absolutely fascinating with all sorts of interesting research from why the wrong apartments are built in the wrong places, to why new buildings are infested with mould and, a...
Aug 08, 2024•26 min•Season 7Ep. 31
Three serious stories straight off the website have caught our attention this week – but there’s a bit of fun too. The first two reports are changes planned in NSW laws to make life more secure and a bit easier for renters. Premier Chris Minns announced last weekend that the government is going to stop no-fault evictions – where landlord move tenants out of their properties because that’s the easiest way of pushing rents up beyond what might be considered reasonable. At the same time the governm...
Jul 30, 2024•27 min•Season 7Ep. 30
Oh, dear. Not another swipe at strata managers, please! Yes, OK, it’s a well-trodden path but, to be fair, the baddies have made themselves easy targets for the past few months. As for the goodies, we’d say, as we often do, that they are in the majority. And how frustrating must it be to try to earn an honest buck and provide a good service to your customers, knowing that your rivals are getting ahead by playing fast and loose with the rules and regulations? And it’s with that in mind that we ve...
Jul 25, 2024•21 min•Season 7Ep. 29
In this week’s podcast we look at NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler and how he’s ramping up his efforts to get his message across before he retires next month. And that message is, basically, if you are buying off the plan right now and you don’t go with a developer who has an iCirt gold star rating, you’ve only got yourself to blame when it all goes pear-shaped. We take a look at Sue's story about people buying property, not only with the help of Mum and Dad, but with investment from ext...
Jul 17, 2024•26 min•Season 7Ep. 28
It’s a bit of a catch-up in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap and a look to the immediate future, too. We’ll be getting abreast of the news that NSW is planning to tighten regulations on strata managers in the state – a move that was announced a couple of weeks ago when Sue was off air. What will this so-called crackdown mean? Will really bad strata managers lose their licences? Not very likely, we say, and for a number of valid reasons. We’ll also be looking at a story that appeared this week in which...
Jul 10, 2024•29 min•Season 7Ep. 27
In this week’s podcast we ask leading strata lawyer David Sachs to run the rule over some of the questions in our Forum. For instance, can the owners corporation charge Airbnb hosts the difference if insurers increase premiums because there are short-term holiday lets in the block? Is it okay to have a paper only AGM with the committee elected by pre-meeting electronic votes? Who pays the costs when a renovator has to get a retrospective by-law for works done without permission? Which law – anti...
Jul 03, 2024•34 min•Season 7Ep. 26
This week on the Flat Chat Wrap we get a glimpse behind the scenes as NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler is a guest at a “town hall” meeting for members of his team. In it David outlines some of the Building Commission’s achievements over the past five years, including the creation of a “defects library” so that certifiers, owners corporations and eventually universities can access the same information about defects, employing the same definitions, so that everyone is on the same page when...
Jun 27, 2024•27 min•Season 7Ep. 25
The tax office is coming after double-dipping landlords who claim all sorts of things they shouldn't, or just claim for stuff the wrong way. And what about levies? It turns out some are tax deductible and others aren't. But which? By the way, in the podcast we say 86 percent of owners who use tax agents get their returns wrong, in fact the ATO says the majority of investors make mistakes in their tax returns despite 86 percent of them using tax agents. Oops! Big difference. Moving on, we also lo...
Jun 20, 2024•19 min•Season 7Ep. 24
A slightly shorter but more pointed podcast this week as Sue reports on plans to demolish two affordable-rent apartment blocks and replace them with one luxury block with fewer, but presumably high-end apartments. It's another potential blow to the supply of affordable housing in desirable areas. City of Sydney have said “no” so the developers have appealed to the Land and Environment Court (LEC)– which held a kerbside hearing outside the site, the other day. Apparently there are half a dozen ot...
Jun 13, 2024•22 min•Season 7Ep. 23
This week we take a swing at polarising polititicians who are hoping to fire up the Nimbys against medium-density housing. They know it's what the state needs, they know it will help resolve the housing crisis, they don't have a viable solution, but hey, if it means they can get a few more votes in marginal constituencies, to Hell with the homeless. Then we go back to the future with Company Title. Are apartment blocks where owners set their own rules and have nothing to do with strata law the a...
Jun 06, 2024•25 min•Season 7Ep. 22
The Podcast takes a musical twist this week when we discuss the ear-bending plight of residents of four apartment blocks in the Sydney suburb of Meadowbank who have been subject to an opera singer practising his scales for 90 minutes every Sunday. How bad can it be? The perp is clearly talented and may even think he’s doing his neighbours a favour by standing on his balcony belting out his do-re-mis, but really? Oddly enough, music-loving Jimmy thinks hitting the high notes for a non-consenting ...
May 30, 2024•26 min•Season 7Ep. 21
This week’s podcast is mostly devoted to embedded networks, what they are, why they can be good or bad, and what you can do to make them work for your strata scheme. To that end, we chat to Joseph Arena of Embedded Networks Arena, a company that will analyse your embedded network contracts – e.g. for energy and hot water systems – and tell you how you can get a better deal. This was recorded via Zoom so the audio may not be up to our usual standards but if you listen to the end of the segment, y...
May 23, 2024•28 min•Season 7Ep. 20
The only story in strata in the past week has been the decision by Building Commissioner David Chandler to hang up his hard hat and retire in August. So we thought the time was right to look at what he has achieved, the challenges he's faced - like being encourage by his then Minister to have a sit-down with a very dodgy developer - and the legacy he leaves behind for his successor. He says his challenge for the last few months of his tenure is to get the message out there that there are more pr...
May 15, 2024•28 min•Season 7Ep. 19
This second part of Lawyer In The Hotseat opens with an apology for promising a discussion on ebikes in last week's podcast, forgetting that it's actually in this, the second part (promise). Otherwise our discussion with strata lawyer David Bannerman covers renovation by-laws and the value of by-laws that would stand up if challenged at a Tribunal but send out a signal about what is unacceptable even if it's legal. We also look at strata managers acting unilaterally, the controversial Building D...
May 09, 2024•28 min•Season 7Ep. 18
As promised, this is the first part of the recording where JimmyT fires questions at leading strata lawyer David Bannerman. Topics include: Does your strata manager have to give you access to the strata roll (including other owners' email addresses)? And what do you do if they don't. What are the new strata laws all about? What do you do about do-nothing strata committees. All this and more in this week's Flat Chat Wrap. ____________________________________________________ Flat Chat is all about...
May 02, 2024•25 min•Season 7Ep. 17
This week’s Flat Chat Wrap covers a lot of ground. including a prison cell in in a studio flat – seriously! – in the same small town in England where our very own Sue Williams cut her journalist teeth. We take a long, hard and highly suspicious look at how real estate pictures are altered to make us think we’re getting something that just isn’t there. You'll find a link to the video HERE . We get a preview of Jimmy’s “Lawyer in the Hot Seat” chat with strata lawyer David Bannerman – including wh...
Apr 25, 2024•27 min•Season 7Ep. 16
