With everyone getting antsy about strata scheme committee members having to undertake some sort of basic training, there is one bunch of people who could use some lessons in the facts of strata life.
I’m talking about the opportunists and speculators who can have an even more profound influences on the lives of apartment owners – small scale developers.
It was almost 10 years ago that we heard on this Forum about the developer of a small block had sold only three out of its 12 units and decided that it was only fair that he and the owners should split the running costs four ways.
Now, setting aside the fact that he had been running water sprinklers all day to make the landscaping as attractive as possible, and he expected the new owners to share the cost of that, this bloke didn’t have a clue.
For a start, owners can only be charged for services calculated according to their unit entitlements. So this clot should have been paying nine times as much as each of the other three owners.
But before you even get to that, you can’t charge levies until you have had the first AGM and agreed on a budget. He hadn’t organised either.
In this case, by the time these simple facts were established, the relationship was toxic between the cowboy developer – who had kept the penthouse apartment for himself – and the new owner-residents.
How different would it have been if, when he applied for planning permission, he’d been sat down and had the facts of strata life explained to him, or at least asked if he knew what it meant to set up a strata scheme from scratch.
You’d think people would have more of an idea a decade later but one Flatchatter has just bought into a small block where the developer has only sold six out of 20 units, hasn’t yet held an AGM but has issued two levy notices.
Fair Trading told them not to pay the levies. You’d like to think FT’s next call was to the developer, telling him to pull his head in and wise up? You can read about that HERE.
FORUM UPDATES
- Strata committee making decisions when it doesn’t have the power to do so. That’s HERE.
- How do you share driveway repair costs with residents in separate blocks? That’s HERE.
- Owners parking on common property without permission, because they always have. That’s HERE.
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