Hi all, new here but very interested in everyone’s comments and thoughts on this topic.
I live in a Strata Plan with major defects (structural, fire, acoustic and general) and we are have a devil of a time getting things moving. We have started proceedings within the specified time, so that’s a good starting point.
The relevance of our problems to the issues in this topic are that we too have a number of things around our development that could easily cause injury. The developer, builder and PCA have been MOST helpful (can you feel the sarcasm in that statement, I hope so)! To repeat what a number of people have said over the years, it amazes me that the responsibility lies in the hands of the owners rather than the people who did shoddy work and the people who could not be bothered to do a proper job certifying that the work met the Building Code – which is most certainly does not.
We don’t have the money to fight a court case AND to fix the dangerous things around the development. So what do we do?
Just for some context, we’re in Sydney, our development is under the last resort insurance scheme, we have outlayed somewhere in the vicinity of $150k on lawyers, engineers reports and experts so far and have seen very little movement. We’re raising more special levies to go to court but I can see a long and hard road ahead. Rough estimates at this stage are that the defects will cost $4-5million.