EXCLUSIVE: By Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson A dedicated Strata Commissioner to protect apartment owners and residents and restore confidence in the strata sector will be introduced by the Labor…
Building surveyors, architects and fire engineers will all have to compensate builders LU Simon up to $12.5 million for the cost of repairing and replacing flammable cladding on Melbourne’s Lacrosse…
The owners of apartments in the now notorious Opal Tower probably don’t realise it, but they are lucky. Obviously, it was bad luck that supporting walls in their building in…
JimmyT rants about Airbnb, defects (and the Opal Tower report) and cladding … and explains why we’ll never get a Royal Commission into the apartment building industry.
Does your pulse race at the thought of someone stealing your parking space? Are you having sleepless nights, worrying about the flat next door going on Airbnb? Have you developed…
I was intrigued this week by the announcement by the Federal Labor leadership that they plan to pour some of the money from their proposed “honesty tax” on banks into…
JimmyT rants about Airbnb, defects (and the Opal Tower report) and cladding … and explains why we’ll never get a Royal Commission into the apartment building industry.
Should you be worried if you have flammable cladding on your building? The simple answer is yes, of course – but perhaps not for the obvious reasons. While the dangers…
About two years ago, I got a phone call from two of my editors at the Sydney Morning Herald. I should say “former editors” – none of us work there…
The fire earlier this month (February 2019) on the outside of the Neo200 building in Melbourne conveniently coincided with a meeting of state and federal government ministers at which it…
Earlier this month (Feb 2019) there was a second flammable cladding fire on the outside of an apartment block in Melbourne. Flat Chat’s JimmyT went on Weekend Sunrise to argue…
A combination of flaws in design, faulty pre-fabrication and inadequate installation of the pre-fabricated walls, plus damage to critical building elements by work done during construction, led to the cracking…