This discussion leads to several interesting areas.
For example, how many landlords are happy with their tenants?
Maybe this is a job for Bill Randolf and his team at the Faculty of the Built Environment at UNSW.
But there’s an important underlying issue here and a major fallacy. Most people think about strata in terms of residential owner-occupiers and that just isn’t so. Apart from the many commercial and industrial strata schemes, the majority of strata lots are owned by investors! About 53% in NSW and an estimated 60-65% in Qld and Victoria. Take away investors and you take away a lot of value. And take away investors and the housing stock in Australia suddenly plummets leaving people homeless.
And this leads to some interesting maths. Owner-occupiers deserve their say. And similarly investor owners. But so do tenants. So for every 100 strata lots, we have 160 people with a vested interest!
It’s been suggested in the past that tenants should have the same rights as owners which is clearly a nonsense. But, tenants (and investors) are the majority and need a better way to communicating their issues. The current link from tenant to property manager to owner to OC breaks down too often.