Pardon me while I do a small lap of honour round my office. Following a couple of calls from yours truly, the NSW Office of Fair Trading has promised to fix legislation that accidentally wiped out insurance cover for building defects in new apartments.
The current regulations, pushed through quietly over the Christmas period, say home owners have only six months from the moment they first noticed or should have noticed a problem to make claims against insurance.
That includes the owners in low-rise apartment blocks of three storeys or less, townhouse complexes and strata “villages”.
Given the complexity of identifying defects in strata complexes, that effectively ruled out many existing and new developments from making claims for defective building works potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. Previously, strata owners had six years to lodge a claim.
The problem arose when the Supreme Court ruled last year that a time limit imposed on home building insurance claims wasn’t legally enforceable. Fair Trading then rushed through a regulation to close a loophole that would have left no time limit on claims at all.
We can’t take all the credit for Fair Trading’s U-Turn. Strata managers, the Institute of Strata Titles Management, strata lawyers like Colin Grace, Francesco Andreone and Stephen Goddard, the Owners Corporation Network and even Shadow Fair Trading Minister Greg Aplin all had a go at Fair Trading.
But when we confronted the Minister’s office, they at first denied anything had changed then came back to say legislation would be introduced at the first possible opportunity to revert to the six years cut-off point there had been previously.
Steve Griffin, Assistant Commissioner at Fair Trading, goes further and assures us that retrospective legislation that fixes the problem will be introduced in the next session of Parliament and that any claims denied as a direct result of the flawed regulation will be reviewed.
(NB< this final paragraph didn't make the cut in the paper)
When the government announced this change, they said they consulted everyone except home owners because there is no peak body that represents them. Write this down, chaps – www.ocn.org.au. That’s the Owners Corporation Network which represents apartment owners – one email to them and you wouldn’t have had to fix this embarrassing mess.