With the Block TV show apartments having very successfully gone under the hammer, all over Australia apartment owners are looking at their walls, windows and floors and wondering if a makeover might make them a million dollar profit.
The combination of a TV hit and ordinary property prices going through the roof anyway, meant all the Blocks’ contestants made a mint out of their DIY renovations.
But the word from the industry is that anyone who imagines their grand designs are going to rake in a small fortune after they’ve ripped their apartments apart then put them together again is a blockhead.
Unless you own the whole apartment block – like the Block’s producers – and you have a TV show of your own to promote the units before sale, you could be stepping into the dry rot of spending more on renovations than you get in profits … while making lifelong enemies of your neighbours.
And that’s assuming you can even get started. Firstly, in an apartment you have to get permission from your Owners Corporation before you change anything to do with common property and that could mean work as minor as drilling a hole in a wall.
Common property includes the floor, ceiling, walls shared with neighbours, windows, balconies, roof space, external walls, some bathroom tiles, some concealed plumbing and wiring and even your front door.
With a few exceptions, everything inside the paint on the walls is yours and everything on the other side of the brushwork is common property.
So you will need to let your strata committee or your building manager know what you are planning to do and when. They may also point you at by-laws or rules that restrict the hours when you can work (evenings and weekends, the happy hours for DIY renovators, being common no-go areas).
If you are planning to reconfigure the apartment’s layout – like, swap a bedroom with the bathroom, for instance – you will probably need council approval.
Even if you are just sprucing the smallest room up a bit, the tiles and seal on bathroom floors and external walls are also common property and the Owners Corp will want all sorts of guarantees that they are going to keep water out of downstairs and next door once you have worked your magic.
That lovely warm timber flooring or those easy-to-clean marble tiles with which you plan to replace your daggy old wall-to-wall carpet could end up stacked next to the bin shelter if you believe the flooring salesman who told you that your strata committee has no power over what you put on your floor.
In fact, they can get orders forcing you to re-carpet the floor if your downstairs neighbour is being driven mad by the uninsulated clatter of your footsteps.
As for the fun part – doing it yourself – it has a limited appeal that will surely wear off quicker than unprimed paint. Seriously, if you want to look like a Block contestant, buy yourself a hard hat and take a selfie, then find a professional.
Professional will get the job done more quicly and efficiently than you ever could. Endless DIY renovations in your spare time are going to drive your neighbours nuts, to the point that they may well shut you down with the help of state Civil Administration Tribunal orders (in Victoria and NSW).
And unless you are going to go completely off the reservation and do everything illegally, you may not be allowed to do a substantial renovation anyway.
In NSW, any DIY work that costs over $10,000, or requires council permission, needs an owner-builder permit … and they won’t give you one of those for work in an apartment.
In Victoria, the owner-builder permit is for work worth over $12,000, but you have to agree to live in the place afterwards. Consumer Affairs Victoria recommends you employ professionals for work costing more than $5,000.
DIY renovators making substantial changes to strata units in Victoria have to take out insurance covering damage to common property or neighbouring units, any legal action or claims that might be made against the owners corporation as a result of the work, and any costs incurred in hiring a surveyor to examine damage and defects.
In any case, wherever you are in Australia, many, if not most buildings will have by-laws that insist on you using qualified professionals with appropriate insurance for any renovations.
And finally, if you have jumped through all the council and owners corp hoops, survived living in a dust cloud, as well as dirty looks from neighbours, you may be lucky just to make your money back, even in a super-heated market.
See, everybody else, whether they watch The Block or not, has their own ideas about what makes a perfect home. They’re not going to pay extra for your renovations if they don’t match their dreams.
It’s better, say real estate professionals, to let prospective buyers see the potential so they can fill in the gaps with their own imaginations … and then let them endure all the grief of rebuilding their home around their own ears.