Podcast: Sirius, sunset clawbacks and feral cats
There is no building in Sydney that has polarised opinions more than the Sirius apartments on Circular Quay – unless you include the Opera House, its architectural antithesis across the…
Strata Defects
They range from minor issues with finishes to major structural and fire safety problems – and when repairs are rwuired , the buck stops with the owners. Hers are hundreds of posts that track the failures of the past and the current efforts to create a less defective future.
Podcast: Would you roll the dice on a $22m flat?
If you have a hankering for the high life and have a lazy $22 million lying around, you could score an apartment in the huge Crown tower above James Packer’s…
Data detectives to hunt down dodgy developments
Dodgy developers and shonky certifiers face even tougher times ahead as NSW Fair Trading uses its massive databases to target serial miscreants and force them to fix their defects before…
Podcast: Horror of our $700 million defects hole
There’s a horror story, a happy ending and a bit of housekeeping in this week’s podcasts. The horror is the $714 million owed by Home Building Compensation for all the…
Podcast: Another U-Turn as Airbnb history repeats
Apologies for subjecting you to another short-term letting vent, but after last week’s state government schemozzle when the new holiday rental regulations were announced, then shelved, we thought we’d better…
Podcast: Airbnb update as holiday let regs put on ice
Sometimes you can be just too efficient. There we were with the NSW government’s proposed regulations on short-term letting hot off the printer, plus industry responses and reactions from apartment…
NSW should help Mascot owners … and why it won’t
It’s been almost two years since the residents of Mascot Towers were told their building was to dangerous to live in. Just last week they were advised to sell the…
Podcast: States’ split is rental as anything
This week, having survived a computer crisis on the home office front, we delve deeper into the differences between the way renters are treated in Victoria and NSW. In the…
Riding shotgun with our building commish
A couple of weeks ago, Sydney Morning Herald and Domain contributor Sue Williams accepted an invitation to see Building Commissioner David Chandler in action on a development site. How do…
Podcast: Life savings lost thanks to dodgy dealing
In this week’s Flat Chat Wrap we discuss the awful story about the young woman who put her life savings into a deposit on a flat in a block that’s…
Podcast: Virtual commutes are transports of delight
Are you over working from home? Does your formerly perfectly adequate apartment now seem tiny. Is your kitchen table too high and your laptop screen too small? Are you one…
Strata data hub promises a mine of information
A few years and a couple of Fair Trading ministers ago, we sat down with then then incumbent Victor Dominello who outlined his dream of a data base that would…