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New to apartments or teetering on the brink of buying your first unit? Trusting that someone somewhere will make the right decisions for everyone?
If only. You need to have your wits about you when you enter the brave new world of apartment living. Here’s a guide to the five basic mistakes apartment-owning newbies often make.
Skimping on the strata search
Of course you’ll do a pre-purchase search – your solicitor or conveyancer will arrange it – but will it be just a spreadsheet of your new unit block’s assets and liabilities, with a nod in the general direction of pest control and fire safety inspections?
Or will it be a forensic examination of the way the strata community works, warts and all? You want the strata committee minutes for the last three years to be studied with an eye on all the conflicts in the past – especially the unresolved ones – and any proposals to changing things in a way that might affect you.
You are looking for expensive works that can’t be delayed any longer. Is the pet-friendly building you took ages to find, about to ban animals? Or vice versa?
Is that lovely heated swimming pool about to have the gas turned off in winter to save money (and the planet)?
You can get a comprehensive report relatively inexpensively – anywhere between $200 and $500 — from a search sharing website like strata specialists Section108.com.au in NSW, mybodycorpreport.com.au in Queensland or beforeyoubid.com.au (where the cost depends on how many people have shared the report). Do your own search for the best option in your area, including Victoria which doesn’t seem to be particularly well-served.
The critical element to look out for is whether they report on the “harmony” in the building. A practised eye on correspondence will reveal most of the cracks in your new community as well as any in the fabric of the building.
And if there’s nothing contentious to be found, be equally cautious. Better to buy into a scheme that had problems and resolved them, than one that pretends it never had any to begin with.
Delaying defect claims
While you are floating away on the “new car smell” of your just-completed apartment, the clock is ticking on building defects. You have six years to claim major defects – fualts that might render the building or your flat uninhabitable – and two years to claim anything else.
Insist your committee gets a building survey done ASAP and, if necessary, lodges a claim. Tick tock, tick tock…
Not reading your by-laws
Your by-laws (or rules) are attached to your contract of sale and tell you what you can and can’t do in your building – whether it’s having a pet or smoking on your balcony. Just because you haven’t read them doesn’t mean they don’t apply – as you will discover when you get a warning followed by a fine.
Not getting involved
Only losers with nothing better to do get themselves elected to strata committees, right? Who has the time? And, hey, how much harm can the people who did get elected do?
You’ll find out when your committee is stacked with fixed-income retirees who do have the time and won’t spend a cent on the building unless the bill is attached to a court order.
Believing that as owners, you can do as you please with your flat
All you really own is the airspace between your walls, the floor and your ceiling. Start messing with anything else without permission and you could be in big trouble.
Apartment living and investing is a very different lifestyle for most Australians. But go in with your eyes open and it can be very rewarding.
This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review
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Beware ‘shared’ strata searches of the public files.
I hear that maybe half strata searches are carried out by uni=students wanting to earn extra money… so reciter to carry out these 30-45min searches … without training etc.
Our latest sale relied on a ‘share’ strata search… paid for by the selling agent
and given to all interested parties at the same time as the contract.Pity it was about 70/80% wrong/inaccurate… Huge gaps on the pro-forma set
form… Most missing items, i.e,. asbestos, etc. omitted altogether… but not pressed for by the searcher, etc… just left blank…The building was said to have been built in 1981… instead of 1912!!! Hopeless…
I am still pressing the NSW Law Society to improve the disclosure standards for its strata Contract of Sale/Purchase… Strata purchasers are lambs led to the slaughter… Yet the govt. expects 4 mill of us to live in strata/.community homes right now!!! while so many of our normal Human Rights are constantly being removed/concealed/omitted…