Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
Tell them they’re dreaming. The fact that they quote an optional by-law, and one that isn’t even on the statute books yet, shows that they have no idea about the laws that they are threatening you with.
That they also think the EC can overturn by-laws shows that their ignorance of the law is remarkable, even by the low standards in strata generally.
Current by-laws are not affected by the new model by-laws, unless the OC meets and agrees to adopt them (with a 75 percent vote at an AGM). Otherwise they really only apply to new buildings that adopt them as a matter of course (and even then, they can pick and choose)
By-laws can only be changed by a “special resolution” at a general meeting or by the orders of an NCAT adjudicator or Member (which ain’t gonna happen).
The current by-law says no pets and, right or wrong, to make an exemption would be to disadvantage owners who don’t want animals in the building.
They are free to lobby owners to get them to vote at a general meeting but they really need to stop making empty threats based on misinformation. Tell them to stop or you will make all the owners aware of their bullying tactics.
To be clear, you are right and they are wrong on so many fronts.
By the way, if they do push this to a general meeting, make sure you also have an item on the agenda that defines an “assistance animal” as:
An animal that has been trained and accredited by an Approved Organisation as Assistance Animals to alleviate the effects of a disability.
And the owners can provide documents detailing the training undertaken at an facility accredited by an animal training organisation prescribed by Section 9 of the Disability Discrimination Act.
I say this because the latest trick for people who want pets in pet-free buildings is to say they are assistance animals. Not only does this make a mockery of by-laws, it undermines the credibilty of people who really do need assistance animals.
These people moved into the block knowing it didn’t allow pets. If they have changed their minds but the other owners haven’t, then they should be looking to live elsewhere.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
There’s nothing to stop you setting up a camera, provided it doesn’t record sound, except that I assume it will be attached to common property and that will require owners corp permission.
I can’t help thinking that will escalate any potential dispute beyond the point where you can still have a civilised discussion.
How about asking the neighbour if his car is being chipped by the stacker? Once he realises your car is getting damaged, he and his kids might be a bit more careful.
Alternatively, take a date-stamped picture every day before you drive the car out and again after you drive it in and you’ll have your evidence without starting WWIII.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@bart said:
We have been down this path before … We stopped short of a Noise abatement order as they seemed to temper their behaviour for a time. Alas it has started again.That’s what happens when you don’t go all the way. A noise abatement order will see them move away to party on someone else’s roof. If they don’t they or the owner can be taken to court.
A noise abatement order against the owner means that whoever is living their, the landlord will cop the fines (as they should).
Don’t try to fight this with one hand tied behind your back. There is no cure for selfish stupidity. Hit them as hard as you can and that will be an end to it.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
I’ve actually been in a similar situation where the tenant wanted to buy the unit so made it difficult to inspect so as to keep the price down.
In your situation, I would advise the real estate agent, in strict confidence, and let them deal with it. They can contact previous potential purchasers and find out the truth of the matter.
It’s not a question of taking sides. Someone is acting deceptively and dishonestly to further their own interests. That is crossing the line, in my book, do all thoughts of divided loyalty are out the window.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
The answer is to gather your evidence and apply to your local District Court for Noise Abatement orders against the landlord. You would normally apply for orders against the tenants but since they are transient and likely to change, it may be more effective to take action against the landlord.
The principle underpinning this is that the landlord has the capacity to limit the noise, under the terms of the Residential Tenancies Act, and they have been made aware of the disturbance but have chosen not to act.
A Noise Abatement Order means that if there is any repetition of the disturbance, the subject of the order is in breach of a court order which is a criminal offence and they can be arrested and fined.
You should get together with other affected neighbours to share the costs of legal advice. This may seem like a sledgehammer to crack a walnut but people have to be held accountable for their actions and this landlord is happyto take the rent but let you deal with the consequences of their “hands-off” approach to their tenants.
Evidence such as police reports and responses from council will be invaluable in building your case so gather everything together and find a lawyer who will run this for you. Our sponsors might be a good place to start.
The precedent for making landlords responsible for the disturbances of their tenants was set in a case heard by Magistrate Grahame on February 22, 2011 in the Downing Centre Local Court.
The case was No 63913/11 – Whitlam Vs Hannah and was an application for a noise abatement 20 order pursuant to s 268.4 of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act of 1997. It stated that an order can be made under s 268 of the Act, if the Local Court is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the alleged offensive noise exists.
NB: This was nothing to do with strata law which, frankly, had failed the owners (as it so often does).
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
A by-law certainly will hold water provided it doesn’t attempt to supersede superior laws or strata law itself.
For instance, if your building is zoned residential, then you can create a by-law saying that rentals must be the minimum allowed under the Residential Tenancies Act (90 days).
However, you can’t restrict the activities of people in the tenancies unless they are a proven nuisance, disturbing the “peaceful enjoyment” of other residents.
If the “girl” want to rent a room or even her sofa bed, she can do so to anyone she likes, provided it is allowed by her own tenancy agreement.
New strata laws to come in later this year will allow strata schemes to create by-laws limiting the number of adults in an apartment to two per bedroom, but it doesn’t sound like that is your problem.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
OK, your landlord has broken the law on several fronts, not least by trashing the terms of the Residential Tenancies Act which covers anyone who has a written or oral rental agreement. It also has a number of obligations that the landlord hasn’t fulfilled – see this factsheet No 1 from Fair Trading .
Even if you have failed to pay the rent on time, the landlord can’t just throw you out. They can give you a notice to quit and then, if you fail to do so, they must apply to NCAT for an order forcing you to leave by a certain date. The can’ just turn up and throw you out and they certainly wouldn’t have the police in tow, either.
So stay calm and start getting the law on your side.
Have a look at this factsheet No 10 from Fair Trading.
As a matter of urgency, call Fair Trading on a number you will find on THIS WEB PAGE.
For help from the Tenants Union, go to their website.
And you can call Legal Aid for advice on 1300 888 529 in office hours.
If you feel threatened, go to your local police station and tell them about the threats.
Finally, remember that this person can’t throw you out without a proper Tribunal order. Start ringing the various agencies now and make sure the landlord knows you have reported his illegal behaviour.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@Kenuppa said:
Regarding possible concrete cancer, I am going to my Doctor next week to have some skin cancers removed so I will take a sample of the concrete and ask him to check it.
Very droll. If anyone wants to know what concrete cancer really is, how damaging it can be and how to fix it, look HERE.
Meanwhile, a couple of things occur to me, and they stem from the fact that the floor and original tiles on it belong to the Owners Corp, and not the lot owner.
Ken should not have gone ahead and dug up the tiles unless they were laid by him under the terms of a by-law, giving him responsibility for the tiles and damage caused in their installation.
If he laid the tiles without getting a by-law passed, then it doesn’t matter whose fault it is – they shouldn’t have been laid in the first place as the floor and any original attached tiles are common property.
If he removed carpet and laid tiles without permission and proper insulation, he’s behind the eight ball on that too.
Secondly, by removing the new tiles, he has removed evidence of whether or not they were broken by movement in the slab or by tenant abuse (although the former seems more likely).
On the question of liability, it all depends on whether the tiles were laid with the written permission of the owners corp, or not. If not, and I was the EC chair, I would tell Ken to go whistle. Illegal tiles that broke? Take us to NCAT if you like but you don’t have a leg (or a tile) to stand on.
On the question of how he can work on his unit without breaching a by-law, the answer is, you go to your EC or strata manager, tell them what you are planning to do and work out a time frame that will cause minimum disruption to other residents. That means during the day and usually by a professional contractor who will work more quickly and efficiently.
If everyone is given due warning and consideration, they won’t complain because they might want to renovate some day themselves.
NOTE to all DIY hobby handymen (and women): If you are doing a home renovation in an apartment block, in the evenings and weekends when your neighbours are all at home, you deserve all the abuse, Notices to Comply and fines that you will inevitably get.
Ken seems to have breached so many by-laws and strata conventions in this episode that broken tiles seem to be the least of his problems.
However, concrete cancer is a serious issue that Ken needs to get the owners corp to look at as a matter of urgency. Now would be a good time, when there are no tiles on the floor. Again, look at this link to see how serious the problem is and what to do about it.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@Willie said:
Is someone able to assist in directing me to the appropriate section of the NSW act where it requires the Executive Committee to enforce by-laws?There is nowhere in the Act that says “The EC must enforce by-laws” but it is clearly implied as one of the EC’s duties.
We put this issue to a very senior staffer at Fair Trading and they said this:
“The by-laws are binding on all owners and occupiers and it is the responsibility of the owners corp to oversee and enforce them via Notices to Comply, mediation or penalties through the NSW Civil Administration Tribunal.
“The EC may decide that certain behaviour does not constitute a breach, but they can’t say they are not responsible for administering by-laws.”
So what do you do if you have a complaint but no one is listening?
“Write to the EC secretary requesting a motion be put to an EC meeting, or even general meeting, to pursue a by-law breach by whatever means, giving the committee full authority to pursue whatever action may be required if the person in breach does not respond.”
And failing that, if they do nothing in two months, or refuse to take action, you take the EC to NCAT for orders under Section 138, which says, in part:
138 General power of Adjudicator to make orders to settle disputes or rectify complaints
(1) An Adjudicator may make an order to settle a dispute or complaint about:
(a) an exercise of, or a failure to exercise, a function conferred or imposed by or under this Act or the by-laws in relation to a strata scheme, or
(b) the operation, administration or management of a strata scheme under this Act.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), an owners corporation or building management committee is taken to have failed to exercise a function if:
(a) it decides not to exercise the function, or
(b) application is made to it to exercise the function and it fails for 2 months after the making of the application to exercise the function in accordance with the application or to inform the applicant that it has decided not to exercise the function in accordance with the application.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@proxaccess said:
When you have a problem with your rental agent you can simply go to the NCAT.As you can see from this web page the complaint is properly more likely to be effective if it is made to Fair Trading under “repairs and maintenance” rather than under any of the issues that would escalate it to NCAT.
The rental agent may indeed be lazy and incompetent, but that isn’t a Tribunal offence (even if it is offensive).
Also, I wonder if the property owner realises how badly managed their property is. The agent will be taking a percentage of the rent for doing nothing. If things go seriously pear-shaped, it’;s the owner who has to pay, not the agent.
Perhaps a calm and informative (i.e. non-abusive) note to the owner might persuade them to change agents to someone giving them something in return for their commission.
There are some landlords who don’t want to know but many if not most are furious when they discover their tenants have been so badly treated by someone they effectively employ.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@John Kaunitz said:
WhaleWe need to untangle the logic of what you saying because I don’t disagree with the concerns you start with. Yes you can have problems with contractors and yes not all strata committees are competent.
However, none of this requires a special resolution requirement to address and having a special resolution passed per se will not protect the owners corporation. It will just make an everyday process to approve routine and essential renovations more difficult.
The pages on Flat Chat are full of tales of people who have had work approved on a nod and a wink – and then their successors as owners and committees are left to carry the can. If you don’t have a system that has some legal authority behind it, it will be exploited, ignored and abused.
In particular, at present, strata committees can set any condition they like in approving a renovation.
No they can’t. Only owners corporations can set conditions in by-laws and you can’t create a by-law that supersedes an existing or superior law.
It has been suggested that the owners corporation could require that their own contractor install the waterproofing. This is not unreasonable since the waterproofing is common property – the property of the owners corporation.
This is news to me. Owners Corps can only insist on specific contractors if there is no alternative that could feasibly do the job properly.
As the law now stands, if owners don’t trust their strata committee they can nominate bathroom renovations as something the strata committee cannot approve. This is a standard motion at every AGM that specifies matters the strata committee cannot deal with.
The AGM – where this motion would be presented – is also where the owners choose their committees. If they don’t trust them, why would they elect them?
The new legislation forces all schemes to approve such routine matters by a special resolution which is a huge impost on all owners, including those in schemes which have dealt with this issue in an effective, professional and trouble free manner for years .
You mean, permission has been granted without any requirement on the part of the owner to take responsibility for the work done and the effect it has on common property, through the instrument of a special resolution by-law? Effective and trouble-free are subjective assessments. Professional? I don’t think so.
It is also a fundamental misuse of the special resolution concept.
In your opinion …
My reading of strata law is that the extraordinary powers of special resolutions are intended to deal with constitutional changes to the strata scheme such as changing common property (as it is defined) or implementing new by-laws. A special resolution is also the mechanism under the new legislation to gain approval for the ultimate constitutional change, namely to wind up the scheme.
Your reading is specious and fundamentally wrong. Special resolutions are designed to allow people to make changes to their own lots and affected common property while accepting responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of the work. Why else would the Act say that in the absence of agreement of who is responsible, that falls back on the owners corp. It’s all about making people responsible for their actions, either as owners or as members of the Owners Corporation.
The requirement to apply the same level of approval to bathroom renovations that every owner could expect to get approval for in a reasonably straightforward manner, is bizarre and absurd to say the least.
It really isn’t. It’s about compelling people to accept they have responsibilities as members of a community. That community will decide how stringent they wan their conditions to be.
The red tape generated is likely to benefit strata lawyers or strata managers who will deal with the resulting legalities but is certainly contrary to the originally stated objective of the strata law review which led to the new legislation.
And the originally stated objective was …?
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
Thanks to Whale for that (above). Now, have a think about the tiles cut and flashing required to make that watertight.
The Owners Corp should definitely be demanding the person who installs it takes responsibility for not only the repair and upkeep of the device, but the roof area into which it has been cut and the waterproofing around it.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
OK Cosmo,
We got there eventually, but the Flat Chat faithful are hanging out for one piece of information … what exactly is a whirlybird?
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.
@Winston said:
In our case the SM agreement is on a 30 day termination status, however I expect the current SM will try and lock in a fixed term renewal since he has now been advised some Lot owners are not happy with the service.
I am advised an EGM will be held soon, which I understand will cover a By-Law changes related to damage to Solid Core door & Fire Door’s to be installed to Lots by owners / tenants, where it will be proposed the Owner be responsible for any damage.
A couple of points: Your EGM can only vote on matters that are on the agenda. You can discuss anything you want – and people will raise extraneous matters – but unless there is an item on the agenda, no one can vote on it. I say this just in case you were hoping to raise other issues at the EGM. If so, you need to put the item on the agenda
Regarding a by-law that owners are responsible for damage to doors. Does this mean that owners will be allowed to install their own front doors? If so, are the doors going to be properly fire rated? Who will check on this? And I wonder if responsibility for this will fall back on the owners corp if council does a fire safety check and discovers the doors are not fire-rated. – this seems unnecessary.
I have never heard of a strata manager on a 30-day notice contract. Are they properly qualified and are they members of Strata Community Australia? If neither, it would explain some of the bizarre behaviour you have outlined here.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.