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It comes down to this. By issuing a work order, the OC is entering a contract.
I agree with all of that. In this case, if you can’t be sure you will have the funds to hand to pay by the payment date, then you should hold off until you are. The contractors will not be interested in you telling them you are chasing up a few backsliders who will, for instance, pay their levies when they’ve sold their flat.
You might even consider getting a line of credit from a strata loan provider – or even better, a strata loan – so you don’t have to worry about chasing bad debts while running up another one for the OC.
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The dishwasher’s (any appliance really) owner/operator is only liable if it’s established they have used it negligently. Good luck with that re dishwashers.
And where do you get that information from? Please quote a source. An NCAT ruling? An insurance company’s website? Anything?
I have a fully integrated dishwasher and I can see where the water input hose and the waste pipe connect to the mains (under the sink). If they burst, I would be liable (if owners corp insurance didn’t cover it).
Your personal experience and your opinion, regardless of how often you repeat it, is not necessarily fact.
I provided an authoritative source for my view. How about you back yours up with, say, a link to a website?
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For a start, mere ownership of something is never enough to establish liability. Negligence is usually needed too.
How may times do you need to be told to check your appliance hoses before failure to do so is negligence?
But I’m going to vary my response slightly and come at it from another direction.
It’s the lot owner’s responsibility but it seems the damage to common property will be covered by strata insurance. However, where it isn’t covered, then the lot owner is liable.
When would strata insurance NOT cover this damage? When there is an excess on the policy and it only covers part of the cost. See this Q&A on Lookupstrata.
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is this the same for any appliance eg: a hot water service also ? Or are there nuances ?
The key to all this is mostly who owns the pipe that burst. If the burst pipe or hose was between the wall and the appliance, then it’s the lot owner’s responsibility. If it was inside a common property wall, it is the owners corp responsibility.
Regarding a hot water service, the same principle applies, except that in many schemes the hot water supply is a common property installation and the OC would then be responsible for the hot water system and the pipes leading to it.
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In both instances it’s the lot owner with the dishwasher who should pay. Normally this would happen via their home and contents insurance.
This is not the owners’ corp’s responsibility in any way shape or form so the “offending” owner is the one who should pay. If the lot owner can’t or won’t pay, the owners corp may be able to claim on its insurance.
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as part of last December’s reforms, holding > 5% of votes by proxy isn’t allowed So will this make it harder to obtain a quorum at AGMs?
Theoretically, yes, as it will be hard to achieve the 50 per cent of voters or unit entitlements required to pass the thereshhold.
However, the meeting can still go ahead but the decisions taken will be “interim resolutions” and, under Section 78 (4) of the Owners Corporation Act must either be confirmed by another general meeting that is announced within 29 days.
OK, bear with me, the actual note in the Act says this:
The effect of subsection (4) is that an interim resolution cannot be acted on for 29 days after it is made but if notice of a special general meeting is given within that 29 day period, the interim resolution cannot be acted on until the resolution is confirmed at that meeting (which must be held within 28 days after the notice is given) or if the meeting is not held, until the end of that 28 day period.
Or, to put that in plain English, if the general meeting wasn’t quorate, the strata committee or strata manager has to set a date for a further meeting within the next 29 days to confirm the “interim resolutions”.
If the meeting is held and the resolutions are confirmed, then that’s all fine and dandy. If the meeting is not held – for instance, you once again don’t get a quorum – then the interim resolutions pass anyway, 28 days after the date of the announcement of the meeting.
Special resolutions and resolutions requiring a unanimous vote can’t be passed in this way (as interim resolutions) so if you are trying to get a by-law established or changed, you’d better start working those numbers.
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Is this in Victoria?
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The Strata Loan idea (for some) is now canned. Due to the reasons you highlighted.
I really feel for the owners who are already doing it tough for whom strata loan repayments might be manageable but a special levy would be disastrous.
It may be a generalisation but the wealthiest in a strata block tend to have the larger apartments and therefore the most power (and the higher levies).
The State government needs to pull its finger out and change the law to allow for a split payments system that allows some owners to contribute a lumps sum while others add repayments of a strata loan to their levies.
Maybe our invisible Fair Trading Minister will suddenly reappear and make this happen.
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The OC must provide keys to all access points to common property.
They could argue that they aren’t preventing its use, just controlling it as owners have to book a time to use it. Might not fly at NCAT but you never know.
I wonder what the real reason is for this restriction. Nearby committee member complaining about the noise? Nefarious activities? Drug dealing? Partners sneaking out of an evening? I think we should be told.
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major repairs required to Strata building. Weighting up various solutions.
1 Q : This relates to implementation of a Strata Loan.
The O.C agrees to cost of repairs. Not all can stump up there share and propose a Strata loan. Some owners are wealthier and would rather pay up front. How is the matter progressed from here ? Is the solution that some Owners pay their quarterly Levy plus a Loan repayment surcharge ?
This is a vexed question as strata law says that levies have to be charged on the basis of unit entitlements alone. What this means in a case like this is that either everybody pays for the loan or everybody pays a special levy.
Is the belief of a Owner who thinks the sale price of their Lot would be adversely affected whilst a loan is in place, justified?
It depends on the owner and prospective purchasers. What might be more off-putting to prospective purchasers would be knowing that work needed to be done and an unspecified special levy was coming down the track.
Prospective buyers will factor levies into their purchase budgets. It’s all swings and roundabouts but there are moves in the current review of strata laws to quarantine strata loans from the levies rule to give owners more flexibility and choice. However, that’s not going to happen overnight.
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Austman’s comments are correct but even if it doesn’t have a sign, that doesn’t mean it’s not a designated exit in case of an emergency. It may just mean that there’s no sign.
Your scheme should have council approved maps showing routes and assembly points and if this gate is on an emergency exit route then it should be openable from the inside.
Apart from that, any strata committee decisions can be overturned by a majority of owners at a general meeting.
If you can get 25 per cent of other owners (by Unit Entitlements) to sign a motion, you can call a general meeting to overturn the decision.
If you can’t get the numbers, then it’s unlikely that you would prevail even if the item was raised at an AGM.
Meanwhile, you could send the committee a “please explain” as there may be other issues that they are trying to deal with that they have decided not to mention in public.
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Either way, the process is the same: you need to get the previous one rescinded or amended, for which you will need the current owner’s permission. You will also need their agreement and permission to bring in a new version. And it will all have to be confirmed by a special resolution at a general meeting.
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looks like it defaults to SP
Agreed. And for other readers, this is a worst case scenario because the owner has permission for the gate posts but the OC has responsibility for its upkeep. If the original owner had just done this without permission, the OC would be in a much stronger position.
However, if I was chair of the scheme I’d be insisting the the owner cleaned up the yard first before I’d so much as called a brickie. And I wouldn’t be authorising even the slightest improvement (rather than repair) until the owner took responsibility for the gate.
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This may get caught up in the Dividing Fences Act.
I think there is a more fundamental question to be established first which is, as Kaindub noted, who is responsible for the lot-side of the gate, based on the by-law passed to allow the gate to be built?
If the by-law includes a clause that establishes the lot owner as being responsible, then that applies. If it doesn’t apportion responsibility to any party, then it defaults to the owners corporation.
If you then discover that there are different parties on either side of the gate, then the Dividing Fences Act may indeed apply.
By the way, it’s because of conflicts like these that strata law was changed to to establish that responsibility for changes to common property must be assigned to either the lot owner or default to the owners corp. This wasn’t to make the owners corp responsible for all changes, but to make the owners aware that if they didn’t make sure responsibility for repairs was passed to the lot owner, then it would revert back to them in the future.
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I got the response from Strata saying they have put the request in to strata committee. I don’t know what has to be decided by the committee and again wrote in the email “communicate through the agent”.
The committee instructs the strata manager (I can only assume that’s what you mean by “Strata”) unless they have delegated powers. The strata manager would then have to instruct the tenants to remove their stuff from the laundry.
Can the ground of non providing space of laundry and no actions by real estate agent for multiple issues be the reason to terminate the lease without any termination fee?
To be on the safe side, you would need to tell the agent that you want to do that and get their approval. If that wasn’t forthcoming, you could take them to Fair Trading and a Tribunal, by which time your lease might be up anyway.
I strongly advise you to contact Fair Trading (13 32 20) and spend a little time on the Tenants Union website which is full of valuable information and advice.
Specifically, have a look at this factsheet which will tell you how to end a fixed-term tenancy early and the grounds on which you can do it.
Rental agents are notoriously lax when it comes to these things, especially when they can pass the buck to the strata committee. But, to be clear, it is the strata committee’s job to maintain the laundry in a usable state, as it’s common property, and the rental agent or landlord’s job to make sure they do if they don’t respond to your requests.
Regarding your earlier question about the tap adaptor, you really should get the strata committee’s permission and, if the laundry is usable without the change (for most people) then you probably should pay for it yourself.
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