Roundup: power brokers, smokers and slackers
Purely coincidentally, in a week where my column in the AFR was banging on about untrained volunteers running massive budgets in their blocks, while competent professionals are too busy to…
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New Airbnb laws? Don’t hold your breath waiting
Psst! Don’t tell anybody but, you know those new laws about short-term holiday letting that everybody got their knickers in a twist about? Well, the rumour is that they’re not…
Cracks showing as Fair Trading loses friends
Fair Trading, the unheralded and little-loved corner of the NSW department of Innovation and Better Regulation has always had its resources stretched to breaking point. It’s a vital service cursed…
Why untrained volunteers run big bucks budgets
They oversee annual budgets of millions of dollars, make decisions that have profound influence on the lives of hundreds of people, pursue policies that could have devastating effects on the…
Roundup: Should neighbours be given your email address?
Do you guard your email address like it’s a secret code to your bank account. Or do you spread it around like confetti? One of the recurring questions on the…
New laws to crack down on dodgy certifiers
Somewhere in the dim but not-so distant past, I recall the government saying it was going to introduce severe penalties for building certifiers who fibbed and gave the Ok the…
Revealed – the top ten most expensive dogs
Considering Flat Chat pretty much owes its existence to pets, maybe we should give them a little more space on our pages. Just to explain, we moved into a new…
Blocks get together to fight crippling cladding bills
Apartment owners facing bills of as much as $60,000 per unit to fix flammable cladding are being invited to join together in an effort to force developers to foot the…
How a sense of security can keep Airbnb at bay
In a number of surveys over the years, one of the top reasons people have given for choosing to live in apartments is security. If being safe in your own…
Have anti-pet by-laws been binned by NCAT?
There’s been a lot of fluff and kerfuffle around the recent publishing of an NCAT decision from earlier this year concerning a little dog called Baxter and an owners corp…
Roundup: Are you being locked out of cheaper power bills?
Are you being balked whenever you try to take advantage of some of the competitive offers from power companies? It seems some developers and a few not very smart strata…
Your nuttiest strata committee is now a podcast
Podcasts are all the rage these days, it seems. So we bought the microphone, downloaded the software and attended the seminar – all we needed to create a podcast was…