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That requirement is for class 1 buildings – ie detached houses, and does not apply to class 2 buildings, such as shared apartment complex Units.
Section 139(2) of the Strata Schemes Management Act prevents an Owners Corporation from restricting whom a lot can the leased to… “s139(2) By-law cannot prevent dealing relating to lot – No by-law is capable of operating to prohibit or restrict the devolution of a lot or a transfer, lease, mortgage or other dealing relating to a lot.”
The person who is leasing the parking bay IS a resident in the building, and must be treated equally to all other residents. That does lead to the curious situation, that their visitors can also, in theory, use your visitors parking spots!
Still, they must obey your building’s by-laws. Make sure they are registered on the strata roll, and that a section 258 Notice has been filed by the owner/agent to record this, which is mandatory. In a practical response, you could talk to the owner of that bay, and see if they can rent it instead to someone living in a Unit in your building, who wants a 2nd parking bay? Often the owner is renting the parking spot informally, and requiring them to record the leasing details under s.258 will make them realise they need to draw up a lease, and disclose the income for tax purposes.
Don’t let the owner shrug off the s.258 Notice, if they say that they don’t have a written lease, and don’t want to arrange one. Their parking tenant must be on the strata roll, or else they are not a resident, and if not a resident then they can’t park in the garage. The s.258 Notice must be provided within 14 days of the lease commencing, too. The tenant can file the s.258 Notice themselves. But you can refuse to allow the person to park there until the roll is updated, and s.139(2) assumes the owner then follows the other requirements of the Act.
I think you could amend your by-laws to only allow visitors to residents who are from the residential lots to use the visitors bays. There are other exclusions in the Act for owners of utility (ie carpark) lots, and a properly drafted by-law would probably be legally enforceable. In fact, you could probably act on that assumption, and once the parking leasee is on the strata roll, you could issue a by-law breach notice, on the basis that he is not entitled to allow his visitors to use the visitors parking bays, because he is only leasing a carparking bay, and car parking bays do not normally get visitors. But check the wording of your parking by-laws.
If the cost and inconvenience of using a strata lawyer to go to NCAT (which I agree is what you should now do) is too much, a cheaper alternative is to use a different strata manager to the one your building is using. They can prepare the paperwork and appear for you, if you want, and they charge less than lawyers. They are great is straight-forward cases, which this appears to be – the building’s excuse of not wanting to spend money is not legally valid! You might need to shop around, because a lot of strata management companies appear to be independent, but are bought up by big strata conglomerates, and might even be owned by the same company that owns the building’s strata manager – so they wont want to get involved.
Strata managers can help individual owners deal with strata problems at other buildings, and they don’t charge as much as lawyers, and are a good option for simple matters.Despite the strata management contract terms, most strata managers will be open to voluntarily terminating the agreement early. You may need to negotiate a payout of part of the base fee for the period foregone. You might need to give notice, often 3 months, but that can be overridden if both parties agree to do so.
Also, many strata management agency agreements are invalid, due to recent changes to the strata law, especially because of the insurance provisions in the agreement. So if a strata manager digs their heels in, take the agreement you signed to a strata lawyer for an opinion of its validity. They can also negotiate the early termination of the agreement.
This is NSW, I assume. The AGM must be held once in each of the building’s financial years. This is not the regular financial year (1 July to 30 June), but each strata building has its own – and working out what this is, is not easy (and can be changed – but that’s another topic). The AGM can be held any time in that period, at the beginning or end. But the building’s financial reporting requires the next year’s be delivered within a period (3 month from memory) after the end of the building’s financial year, which usually is attached to the AGM agenda. But in summary, the date of the AGM is normally set around the same time each year, just after the building’s financial year ends, but can be moved practically anywhere, if the secretary or SC wants to.
The meeting procedures for general meetings are set out in Schedule 1 of the SSMA. Once the agenda is sent out, you can’t add items to it, and the agenda specifies the date and time of the AGM – and at least 14 days clear notice must be provided.
So if your strata manager has set a date for the AGM, you can attend and ask for an adjournment, and if the other attendees approve, then that happens. But your chair will set the new date, but is usually amenable to suggestions from attendees.
A general meeting can be called at any time, either by the secretary, the strata committee, or a quarter of the owners. So if a decision it made at the AGM – or some matter is not on the agenda, then another general meeting can be called (often called an “extraordinary” general meeting) to fix the matter. These work like AGMs, although only 7 days clear notice is needed to issue the agenda.
The meeting can only proceed if there is a quorum of owners present (in person or by proxy), which is generally a quarter or more of owners able to vote, and a half hour is allowed after the official start time to collect them. So if not enough owners attend, the meeting can be adjourned for at least 7 days. This depends on the chairperson, or they can proceed with the meeting with those present. At the adjourned meeting, whoever attends decides the meeting.
Item #20 of Schedule 1, allows the meeting to be adjourned until a later date, and this requires the meeting to pass a motion, by majority vote, with the chairperson choosing the new day.
So you can attend the meeting, and request an adjournment to a later date. If the majority of owners present approve this, then that will occur. Note that the agenda is not changed.
You haven’t mentioned why you want the date of the AGM changed? If it’s to allow you to attend, but there’s something preventing this, then you should provide a proxy to another person to attend in your place. Note there are rules for submitting a proxy, so check the form if properly filled in. Nowadays, strata AGMs are often conducted electronically, via Zoom or the like, so check if this is available for you, with your strata manager or secretary. You can also attend via telephone – arrange someone to bring their phone to the meeting and you attend via speaker…
Electronic attendance isn’t automatic; the owners must consent. And be careful that you are financial – if not, then you can’t vote, but you still contribute to the quorum count.The strata committee should arrange a report into Work Health and Safety from a reputable safety company (eg “BIV” is the biggest company doing this), to advise on the risk and how to avoid it. This determines if the risk is significant. A hedge takes time to grow, so a temporary solution may be needed until it reaches a good height. Providing a WH&S report is normally an agenda item for each strata AGM.
Otherwise a consulting engineer, knowledgeable about safety, could be engaged to provide potential solutions.
This is normally not a thing you should guess at, unless the solution you come up with will clearly mitigate the problem. I think a drop of 2.4m is high, and the building code may have some specific requirements, like a fixed balustrade. It will also depend on if the drop is on lot property, or common property, and who has access to the area. Get expert advice!
Yes, it’s complicated. The damage to your Unit was to your floating wood flooring, which is the owner’s property, not common property. If the cause of the water was from common property, such as a broken pipe supplying several Units, then you should have a claim against them. If the cause of the water was from a specific owner’s property, then you should have a claim against them.
Talk to your strata manager. But his is why owners get contents insurance. Without that, you will need to fund the repairs yourself. And making a claim against the other owner might involve legal proceedings, which will cost you, too.
You need to determine the type of renovation – major, minor or cosmetic, and the renovation procedure depends on this, as well as your building’s by-laws. If you renovation is a legal (ie, would be allowed) and you are sure of that, then go ahead with the renovation. The OC would then have to scramble to get involved, and the result will be the same. Otherwise, get a strata lawyer involved, especially if there are serious costs involved.
I assume you have checked your current by-laws, which are silent about the laundry? The next place to look is on the strata plan. For a 60’s building, it will probably just show the communal laundry as “common property” (“CP” usually). If it references the room as being a laundry then that would possibly make things more complex.
But, the OC has been providing the building with a communal laundry as part of the common property, and so s.106 does require the OC to maintain this, and keep it functioning. If the OC wants to cease providing laundry services, then s.106(3) applies, and the OC can by special resolution (ie roughly 75% support – but actually more complicated), determine that “(a) it is inappropriate the maintain, renew, replace or repair the property, and (b) its decision will not affect the safety of (anything) or detract from the appearance of any property”.So you hold a general meeting (AGM or extraordinary) with an agenda item to cease providing any laundry services and to close the laundry (or better convert it to another purpose). If that is supported, and not more than 25% of owners don’t vote against it, then that is done.
However, the Building Code might require buildings like yours to provide a laundry or clothes line etc? Your development application might also require this (but building’s from the 60’s typically have a 1-page DA, but you should check that too.) Some one else might be able to respond to whether laundries or clothes lines are required, in building’s where the Units don’t have internal laundries?
Another complication, is that you cannot discriminate and all owners must have equal access to facilities. Getting rid of the communal washing machine is possible, and you can offer the owners use of the laundry room to install their own machines, which are connected to their own lot’s power supply and to the water supply. But you must allow for 8 washing machines, and provide each Unit with its own space there. If you have another room that can be converted to a laundry that will hold the 2nd set of machines, then that could be designated for that purpose, whether or not it is ever used.
You could create a by-law setting out the rules for the laundry; that any owner can apply to locate a washing machine in the specified areas, and the OC will permit this, provided they arrange a power supply to their own lot’s electricity meter, and a connection to the cold water supply. The by-law can specify rules, about times of use, hanging or drying clothes, the type or size of permitted machines, whether driers (or combined washer/driers) are permitted, which will depend on ventilation and fire safety – etc.
Your current room allows for 4 machines, so when the 5th owner applies, the OC will then probably need to convert another room for them to use. Maybe there wont be much demand, if Units have their own laundries. Your laundry by-law could state that the communal laundry room is only available to lots which do not otherwise provide laundry facilities. This could potentially invalidate the by-law by being “harsh, unconscionable or oppressive” (sections 139, 150), so it may be a good idea to have a strata lawyer draft the by-law to minimise that risk.
It’s strange that you “paid a substantial amount of money – thousands of dollars – in a special levy for work to repair common property”, but the work was abandoned? The owners corporation has a strict duty under section 106 to repair common property, which cannot be overruled by any owners corporation meeting decision. If that common property needs repair, then it must be repaired.
However, under section 106(3) the owners corporation can determine, by passing a special resolution, that it is “inappropriate” to maintain some item of common property, so long as that determination does not affect the safety of anything, or does not detract from the appearance of anything (part (3)(c)).
The owners corporation cannot decide not to repair common property without such a determination. So if you have common property in need of repair, then you need to spend that special levy money to do so, and the cost or timing of the repairs is no excuse to avoid carrying out that duty.“For instance, I know of a low-rise apartment block with multiple lifts where a few apartments don’t have or need lift access. In this block, only the apartments with lift access contribute to the lift maintenance fund.”
I believe this type of approach can only be arranged with a “common property rights by-law” under Section 142 of the Strata Schemes Management Act, which requires the written consent of ALL the owners affected by the by-law. This can happen with new buildings, where the developer is initially the owner of all the lots, and they write a by-law to separate out some of the facilities to be paid for by a sub-set of owners – like only the upper-floor lots pay for the lift maintenance. But once the building is operating normally, this type of arrangement is hard to arrange. Since it will just take one owner to refuse to sign a consent to the by-law to prevent it being made. In this example, any of the upper-floor lot owners will realise that having all the owners pay to maintain the lift (which is the default), will be in their best interests.
But in the absence of a common property rights by-law the cost of maintaining, repairing and replacing common property is shared among all owners, according to unit entitlements.
Jimmy-T may be right, that you could challenge the validity of the proxy forms, if you can show they were signed and dated with a blank name of the recipient of the proxy, which was later filled in. I suspect this is a common practice, and the Tribunal may or may not find in your favour if you ran that case. Also, the purpose of a proxy is to permit anyone to act on behalf of an owner, and it would not be too difficult to arrange for valid proxies to be made out to the current management team, with a little more effort involved.
Nevertheless, that would still leave you with some valid proxies, and some owners voting for the current management team. Have you got the numbers to out-vote them? I would suggest you do what your opponent have done – contact all the other owners, put a valid case to them to elect a different management team, and rally the majority of owners in your building to elect you and your team of owners.
Your assumption that only the secretary of the strata committee has access to all the owner’s contact details is not correct. Any owner can get access to that information, although you may need to pay a small fee to do so.Yes, Section 36(2) of the Strata Schemes Management Act states that a “decision of a strata committee is taken to be the decision of the owners corporation”, but if there is a disagreement between the two, then the owners corporation decision prevails.
Schedule 2 in the Act sets out how decisions by the strata committee are made; essentially by a majority vote to a motion properly put at a strata committee meeting. Sufficient notice of the meeting must be given, and there must be an agenda listing the motions for the meeting, and minutes made and distributed afterwards.
As Jimmy-T says. But water leaks are an emergency measure, and so need to be responded to quickly. The extra time to get more quotes may not be warranted, so the repairs can start immediately. The cost looks in the ball-park for this sort of work, so I’d say go with it.
And as a long-suffering secretary of a strata building, I am a little peeved at other owners telling the committee to get more quotes, when the quotes are reasonable. It’s bloody hard to get quotes! Tradies prefer to do paid work than to turn up and help make 3 quotes, when they aren’t likely to get the work. It’s really hard, currently, to get any quotes at all for jobs… So, my common response for owners, like you, who want more quotes, is to say “thank you for helping out, and please arrange them and provide them to me within the next 10 days, or so, as we need to progress with the job”. Never hear anything further…
To quote from the Bannermans Lawyers’ article about this:-
What about damage to my lot property that will result from the owners corporation carrying out
repairs to common property?
If the owners corporation damages your lot property in the course of repairing and maintaining the
common property, it is liable for the damage to your lot property.It’s not about ownership of the property, it’s about liability. If you damage someone else’s car, you are responsible for its repairs. If the Owners Corporation leak damages your property, like ceiling paint, or carpet, then the OC is liable for its repair.