- This topic has 1 reply, 1 voice, and was last updated 2 weeks, 6 days ago by .
-
Topic
-
My daughter purchased an old apartment in W. Sydney in 2018. She found signs of water damage on the ceiling of the balcony directly below hers. In that year, she hired a waterproofing tradesman to waterproof and re-tile the balcony, to make sure the balcony wouldn’t leak. She didn’t know balcony is common property.Last week, the strata manager discovered that my daughter had altered her balcony without strata approval.The strata manager sent emails to other apartment owners, advising them to set up by-laws to negate all strata liabilities on the balcony. My daughter is responsible for all the maintenance, repairs and upkeep of the balcony.My daughter is very emotional and stressed. I think she will have difficulties selling her apartment now.Is there anything that my daughter can do ?What is the best way to deal with this strata issue?
-
Replies
-
My understanding is that owners can only be signed up to a common property by-law with active consent – i.e. they sign the documents – unless the owners corp takes a reasonable proposal to the Tribunal and asks them to force it’s acceptance.
What the owner should remember is that if they had told the strata committee about this work, they would have been required to agree to a by-law accepting responsibility for the future maintenance of the tiles and waterproofing in any case. This is standard practice.
A reasonable by-law would be that the owners agrees to maintain and repair the tiles and waterproofing should they fail at at any time. An unreasonable by-law might expect them to take responsibility for the structure of the balcony and balustrade an I would be astonished if this is what the strata manager was demanding
The owner is well within their rights to reject any by-law that is not fair and reasonable, but they do have to take responsibility for the work that they’ve done without prior permission.
None of this will affect the saleability of the unit, unless the owner or Owners Corp refuses to agree to reasonable requests which, in any case, would be easily dealt with at a Tribunal.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.