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Ok, I will come across as the discriminating bad guy and I will take the hits, but I have been informed that an owner in our building has leased his property to the Department Of Housing in NSW.
I think it’s called Headleasing.
I do suppose an owner has a right to lease his property to whoever, but I would have thought the OC should be made aware that this arrangement is operating in their strata.
Plenty of great Housing Commission tenants and plenty of bad ones as well.
Thoughts?
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A few units in our block (same owner) were leased to Defence Housing a few years back. I don’t know if DH is still “recruiting” but they did run advertising campaigns for properties at the time.
We had a spate of complaints about this a couple of years ago and the issue was that when there was a badly behaved tenant, they sometimes took the attitude of not having to abide by owners corp by-laws as they were HC tenants.
The Housing Commission refused to take responsibility because they weren’t the owners.
The owners refused to take responsibility becasue their head tenants were theHC.
However, if I recall, this was all resolved fairly quickly when the tenants, the Housing Commission an the owners were all brought to heel by Fair Trading and/or the then CTTT who explained that they each had their own responsibilities to abide by the by-laws and strata laws and (I think) there was even an attempt to collar the individual civil servants who had been saying “not our problem”.
But that’s all by-the-by. The owner has a legally enforceable responsibility to inform the OC who is tenanting the unit. They are also required to provide the head tenants and the tenants with a copy of the by-laws.
So your secretary or strata manager should make sure everyone down that chain is made aware of their responsibilities (without assuming that there will be a problem).
That simple basic level of diligence may be enough to put all parties on their best behaviour. If not and there are consequences, they only have themselves to blame.
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