A few years ago a family I knew ended up homeless because they didn’t live in a strata scheme and maybe didn’t even know what strata was.

See, the daughter of the family and her husband had a single-storey house and they agreed to let her mum and dad build another floor on top, on the same floor plan, saving a lot of money from not having to buy land on which to build their own house.

Now, I’m not saying having the in-laws living directly upstairs put a strain on the marriage, but it eventually fell apart.  Then, in the divorce settlement, the son-in-law got the house and he told his ex-wife’s family to pack their bags and move out.

They hadn’t thought to register the upstairs flat as a separate dwelling – presumably as a strata scheme – so they were left with nothing.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to one of the big questions in this week’s Forum. How do you separate a small strata scheme – an old house and a duplex on a subdivision – into three separate Torrens Title dwellings?

The answer is probably even more complex than you’d think and you can find it HERE.

Elsewhere in the Forum

• Landlord wants us to pay for increased damage to something they should have fixed before we moved in. That’s HERE.
• Our strata manager won’t answer the phone. That’s HERE.
• Strata manager doing nothing about balcony repair. That’s HERE.

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