OCN fears ignored as Covid strikes strata units
Updated, Wednesday June 16, 8.30am The announcement of six Covid-19 infections in a Melbourne strata scheme, with residents in the 100-unit townhouse complex now in lockdown, has raised alarm with…
Strata Parking
One of the more contentious issues in strata, mainly caused by residents having more cars than parking spots or using their garages for storage, games rooms or whatever, then illegally parking in common property. And pity help you if you have an open car park near a railway station …
Please bear in mind that some of these posts are quite old and the laws may have changed. Also the specific references to parking may be somewhere deep inside the post, especially in Forum roundups and Podcasts.
Developer of 1400 units facing defects claims
They say no publicity is bad publicity but you’d be forgiven for thinking the directors of Sydney developers Toplace Group would be happy to shuffle out of the limelight right…
Podcast: GOMO, strata facts and sea changes
This week on the podcast we look GOMO, specifically grief over missing out on your dream home. It’s the other side of FOMO, where fear of missing out has you…
With $1.7m one-bedders – you cannot be Sirius
The boxy, brutalist Sirius building is about to be transformed from a pragmatic, utilitarian ugly duckling to a swan worthy of a ballet at the Sydney Opera House, over which…
Podcast: Property price panic and dodgy donations
With property prices soaring but houses outstripping apartments, as detailed in this story, we try to make sense of it all. Why is the gap between the cost of houses…
Why apartments are more sustainable than houses
A week or so ago I wrote a piece about recycling food scraps in which I repeated the theory that apartment blocks are less sustainable than standalone houses. You can…
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…
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…
Forum: Back-scratching backsliders face big fines
There’s always likely to be a bit of mutual back-scratching on any strata committee, but when it runs to turning a blind eye to payments that should have been made…
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…
Ghost parking – sweet revenge on a rogue parker
This may be too good to be true – and too delicious to reject out of hand – but we may have found a way of moving cars parked illegally…
Forum: Parking vigilante is breaking the law
Let’s be honest, if you’ve ever found someone else’s car in your parking spot, you’ll have been tempted just to park in behind it and leave it there, ignoring pleas…