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When an apartment resident decided to grow a “sauvage” garden on his balcony – filling it with soil and letting it grow wild – he claimed the by-laws allowed for planters and that was all he had.
The owners corp knew this wasn’t the case but how could they prove it? Without the owner’s permission, there was no way they could access the balcony to take pictures to prove it was an illegal installation.
And an order from the tribunal allowing them access might be impossible to get without some sort of proof.
“Aha!”, said one committee member, how about we use a drone – a radio controlled flying machine with a camera – to take a picture.
“Ah, but …” said another, real estate agents in South Australia have just been banned from taking pictures of properties with a drone. And anyway, said another, this would be an invasion of privacy, so we can’t.
Is this true? Yes and no. The SA agent was ordered to stop taking pictures because they didn’t have a license to fly a drone for commercial purposes. If they’d been taking the aerial shots of the property for fun, it would have been OK.
What about privacy? This is quite complicated, but there aren’t many restrictions on an individual taking pictures of anything, provided it’s not for lewd purposes and you aren’t actually on the person’s property without permission when you are taking the picture.
So could an enterprising strata manager or committee member fly a drone up there and take a few snaps?
Probably not, as corporations have to observe more stringent privacy laws and it could even be argued that they were flying the drone for commercial purposes.
You could “encourage” a tech-savvy 12-year-old to fly the drone and take pictures of everything he sees – which might just include the offending balcony.
But you’d want to warn all your residents that there was an eye in the sky … just in case. The problem with that is, then it’d be official and you’d be back to square one.
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