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You may find that the tenant has a mental illness of some kind and it can be difficult for him/her to control the behaviour. If that’s the case, I would almost bet that the Tribunal would give him/her a “second chance” and you’ll be waiting forever for this to finally be resolved in a way you can live with.
Have you spoken directly to the landlord? Getting the landlord involved may be the cheapest way out of this (via eviction at the appropriate time and for an appropriate reason that can’t be challenged – could the unit possibly need renovating? Or does the Landlord have a family member who’d like to move in for a period?)
I also suggest maintaining a detailed log of incidents – time, date, nature of verbal abuse, background to incident, Police involvement.
You say you contacted the “real estate”. Do you mean the agent that manages the property? Do you pay your rent to that agent? If so, I don’t understand why they are not paying the plumber out of the rent you pay. It might be a timing issue. If the plumber’s invoice landed with the real estate in late November or early December, then there might not have been enough money in the Landlord’s account to pay the plumber’s invoice before the real estate agent shut down for Christmas (even if you pay your rent on time, those funds may have already gone to pay another invoice such as a strata levy). The plumber is being pretty impatient in my opinion – lots of businesses shut down from mid-December to early January.
Totally agree with everything, but still infuriated that people who won’t clean up or put their own bins out then complain about high strata fees (owner occupiers) and rents (tenants).
I’m infuriated that we have to pay for a service to come by every week and put the bins out, then move them back in. If these residents and tenants lived in a house, they would be putting out their own bins. When did apartment-dwellers get the idea that they are living in some kind of hotel situation? I was staying in an apartment recently in Utrecht and there was a cleaning roster for common areas with a list of what needed to be done. This kept strata costs down and presumably anyone who didn’t want to take their turn could hire a cleaner at their own expense. I grit my teeth when tenants complain about rental costs while walking past the cleaners, gardeners and bin-service people who are working for them.
Sorry everyone for my earlier post that said our Owners Corp could have been left high and dry if there were insufficient funds available from settlement to cover the unpaid levies (and interest, solicitor fees, collections fees, court fees etc). We were aware that the debt would pass to the new owner but we were also told that a savvy new owner could make it a condition of purchase that they were not responsible for that debt, and then we would have to pursue the prior owner through court. Effectively “high and dry” with only expensive legal remedies available to us.
Also, what if the new owner also refused to pay? How long would this drag on?
That comment led a few other posters off track. But my main point is – no, I would never again allow unpaid levies to slide as they can slide to the point where it’s difficult to recover them and as we found, once it got to that stage the owner stopped engaging with the other Committee members and started to neglect his apartments, to the detriment of all.
We’ve just been through this in a block of six units in Sydney. One owner had two lots in the block (rented out) and fell behind in levies. Seriously behind. I don’t know anything about his financial situation but I think some personal issues were impacting his income. The levies had been temporarily increased for 2-3 years (all owners were on the Committee so he was part of that decision) because we needed to replace the lift, which is a huge expense for just six lots and five owners.
After he hadn’t paid these hefty levies for more than a year, we asked the strata manager to take action (should have happened earlier but for some reason the strata manager dropped the ball). Collections activity escalated over about 12 months and ended up with bankruptcy. He then sold both apartments. New owners moved in and we discovered that his tenants had been living with all kinds of unresolved maintenance issues, some of which were the responsibility of the owners’ corporation. So we’re now up for maintenance that might not have been so bad if he’d reported it earlier, but I think he was trying to keep his head down because he owed so much money.
The point is, during that 2-3 year period, four owners were keeping the building going – paying all the bills and also saving for the lift. The lift was essential as we have frail people in the building who rely on it to get upstairs from the carpark. So it had to happen, even if we were still chasing his portion of the funds. The four of us who were paying were really struggling as these levies were huge and we had to keep paying these high levies to make up for his shortfall.
Now that the units have changed hands, the outstanding levies have been paid through the settlement process and we have sufficient funds to cover the lift and hopefully enough left over to pay for the unexpected maintenance on his apartments. But we were seriously panicking about that settlement process, unsure whether there would be enough money to pay us. If he was over-mortgaged and also owed money to the state government for unpaid land tax, the owners’ corporation could have been left high and dry. Owners’ corporation is an unsecured creditor, so among the last to be paid. We really need that protection currently provided in the rules – in part so that the debts don’t get so high they are unmanageable and cause perverse outcomes (which happened in our case with him owing so much money he didn’t feel he could ask for necessary maintenance work).