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Strata levies are based on the Unit Entitlements set by the developer and are based, loosely, on the relative value of the apartments. Thus a large apartment on a lower floor with no views can have lower unit entitlements than a smaller unit on a higher floor with views.
However, in the past some developers have artificially lowered the levies on premium apartments to make them more attractive to big-spending purchasers.
The problem for the other owners is that it can be horrendously expensive to get the levies adjusted to a reasonable level because you need surveyors and lawyers and the people who are going to have to pay a lot more will fight any changes. Often owners will decide that the benefit of having their levies lowered was outwieghed by the cost of getting it done.
One of the few cases that I have heard of where it was worth the apartment owners having the UEs recalculated was a development in Sydney where a supermarket on the ground floor and basement had lower levies than one-bedroom flats in the building above.
That said, it has become easier in recent years to do this as the courts will accept sample surveys of apartments rather that wanting every unit in the block to be surveyed so that comparisons can be made.
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My questions are: How do regular lot owners find out if their committee has completed the training? What can an owner do if some or all committee members haven’t completed it?
Good questions. If you scroll down the page you have linked, it tells you that committee members who have completed the training will get a “certificate of completion.” But it also says Fair Trading will not take action against committee members who don’t complete the training and continue serving. In other words, it’s a mess. But it’s worth reading the link you sent, in full and in detail. In summary, it seems to put the pressure on the committee secretary to make sure all the members have done the training. Light the touch paper and stand well back – fireworks are about to ensue.
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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.
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I seem to recall in the past couple of years someone promoting themselves (highly dubiously) as the “Strata Ombudsman” got a chunk of state government funding to produce a guide for new strata owners who’d just bought in. Has anyone seen a copy? I’d love to get my hands on one.
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The front door of your unit is common property and the Owners Corp has a responsibility to make sure it is fire safe and secure. Your issue with getting a hollow door (apart frm persuading the other three owners) is that it may not be fire safe.
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That is why I do not believe training should be limited to strata committee members. Training should extend to the owners corporation and owners generally.
Would you suggest that votes at a general meeting should be contingent on an owner providing proof that they have undertaken some sort of strata training? Too radical? Undemocratic? Pesonally, I think anyone turning up to vote in a general or state election should be asked three basic questions- what is the name of the Prime Minister/Premier, what is the name of your local MP and who is Australia’s head of state. Failure to answer two out of three correctly would result in them being marked as having attended to vote but not getting a ballot paper.
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We should probably start by defining what a vexatious litigant is. Some people use litigation to achieve resolution to a dispute, and that’s the purpose of litigation. It isn’t actually to run the theatrics of a hearing. It’s to achieve a desired outcome, resolution of a dispute between two people. Settlement during litigation typically leads to a finite resolution of that dispute.
However, when people can’t finalise a resolution between themselves and they go to a hearing, they may find themselves in a situation where they get a decision that they don’t agree with.
And everyone has a right of appeal against that decision. And if they don’t like the appeal decision, they might appeal that further and they might appeal that further and they might lose three or four appeals.
But that’s not necessarily a vexatious litigant. That’s just a litigant who is running appeals, who is not happy with the legal outcome in their case.
But if you have a person who, who just is triggering litigation or triggering mediation and withdrawing it before the hearing and just causing angst for people by having to deal with the pressures of litigation. If there’s no merit behind their or substance behind their allegations, and this has occurred several times, then you have a vexatious litigant. In essence, it’s somebody who’s using litigation to pressure people for an unjust result.
So a vexatious litigant is somebody who’s hassling people through litigation that has no merit of success and the Supreme Court can decree that person to be a vexatious litigant. There have been strata vexatious litigants who have been taken to the Supreme Court and had been ordered that they can’t commence any litigation regarding a certain type of dispute in a certain type of owners corporation without the consent of the court. And that’s the benefit of going all that way to record the person as a vexatious litigant.
At the tribunal level, if it decides the case had no merit or was hopeless, and the litigant was warned about that, the respondents (defendants) can get a cost order, meaning the person who persisted in the case has to pay both sides’ legal costs. So anyone running a case that has no chance of success, and they know it, is exposed to paying the owner’s corporation’s litigation costs.
NB: The above response has been edited from a transcript of the webinar.
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Actually, the answer may be for the owner to register the occupant on the strata roll, then the committee can start issuing Notices To Comply which carry threats of fines.
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This is all a bit complicated, not least by the fact that you don’t want the cage any more.
There is another issue, which is that owners often think they have the right to build the cage to the edge of their parking space, which is not strictly true. Parking spaces are designed with the assumption that the residents’ car doors can be opened over the adjoining spaces. A cage on the boundary of the parking space doesn’t allow for that (not that I’m saying this is the case in your situation).
Then there’s the question of what’s allowed to be stored in the cage, and the visual impact of the cage, all of which leads many strata schemes to use their common property rights to ban storage cages altogether.
Given the non-communicative chair, I would now conduct all your communications in writing. Actually, this would be my advice in any circumstances. Verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they’r not printed on.
And given that you no longer require the cage, I would suggest you go on to AI (Chat-GPT or Claude.ai) and ask it to write a by-law compliant with NSW strata laws, that would allow you to keep the cage. BTW, if you wanted to keep the cage, my advice would be to consult a lawyer about the by-law.
Then send the by-law to the secretary of the scheme and ask for it’s approval at the next General Meeting. They will probably reject it, you can apply for mediation at NCAT, they will still say no but by then the war in Iran will be over, the Straits of Hormuz will be open, petrol prices will have returned to normal and there will be a whole new flock of lambs that require protection.
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is there anyway I could ask to replace those windows despite not been mine ?
Does this mean you are a renter rather than an owner? Or do you mean because the windows are common property?
If the former, you would need to ask your landlord. If that latter, the owners corp would have to approve and you would need to get a by-law approved, accepting responsibility for their ongoing maintenance and repairs. However, the installation of double-glazing is a suastainability issue, so you should find it easier to get the necessary approvals.And I would recommend Windowline, our sponsors. See ad on these pages.
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The strata report on a strata building that is not fully compliant with the law will ensure that the Unit is unsellable, or only sellable at a large discount. Even if you sell to a naive purchaser, they will be able to take legal action against the previous owner, if they later find the strata laws were not followed.
I’m not sure about that. I think Caveat Emptor – buyer beware – still applies. It’s different if the vendor lies about what has been done and what hasn’t. But I don’t think it’s legally or enforceably incumbent on them to offer the information to potential buyers that the building has been badly run. Only thorough and professional strata checks will do that.
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Our bylaws include behaviour by “occupants” which would probably cover this situation if they had the same.
He may be occupying the apartment but if he isn’t on the strata roll, then he has no official standing when it comes to Notices to Comply and potential fines. They would be the apartment owner’s problem, as they are in this case.
The simple answer would be to hammer the apartment owner until they did something, but it wouldn’t do much for community spirit and there’s no guarantee that Tribunal action would fly if the owners could show they were doing everything possible in their limited power.
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He must have been given a key to the front door to get inside in the first place, so he must have the owners permission? Must be more to this story than it seems?
I believe there was an intermediary who unknowingly allowed the relative to have access without the owner’s approval. The fact remains that the occupant shouldn’t be there and the owner and the neighbours want him gone.
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