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Anna R – I’ve always wondered why an Owners Corporation would need to put and pass a Special Resolution at a General Meeting of Owners in order to change / add to its own Common Property, but it does – refer the relevant section of the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act below:
65A Owners corporation may make or authorise changes to common property
(1) For the purpose of improving or enhancing the common property, an owners corporation or an owner of a lot may take any of the following action, but only if a special resolution has first been passed at a general meeting of the owners corporation that specifically authorises the taking of the particular action proposed:
(a) add to the common property
(b) alter the common property
(c) erect a structure on the common property
Silversleuth – Jimmy T’s right; don’t let a lazy and/or inexperienced strata manager snow you. Here’s a worthwhile link to guide your actions now and in future.
No, and none is required because under the standard arrangements individual Lot Owners pay their Water Utility’s service fees, and where those Lots are not individually metered as is the case with your Plan, the Owners Corporation (that is all Owners collectively) pays the fees in relation to the Plan’s total water consumption (i.e. for Lots and Common Property areas), with each Owner’s share of that being a function of the Units of Entitlement (UOE) applicable to their Lot/s.
In more simple terms, if the aggregate UOE for your Plan is 100, the UOE for your Lot is 10, and the Utility’s fee for the Plan’s total water consumption is $1,000, then you would pay (10/100 x 1,000) $100 as your contribution as part of your overall Levy Contributions to your Plan’s administrative fund.
Not ideal I agree as the contribution to water consumption fees by individual Owners bears no relationship to how much water is consumed within their Lot/s, but if and until State Government/s decide to subsidise (I hate that word because it’s our money they’re using!) the cost of Water Utilities supplying water meters and plumbers’ costs to install them to individual Lots within Strata Plans (where that’s possible), there’s no practicle solution to the current situation.
Silverslueth – you don’t need to become Superslueth in order to deal with your neighbouring Owner and their sprinklers. Believe it or not, one of the advantages of living in a strata community is that you have a representative body of your fellow Owners called an Executive Committee over here in the east, and from what I’ve quickly researched a “Council” in WA.
More than likely, your Strata will have engaged the services of a Management Company to assist your Council in its management of the Strata. So your next step should be to approach that Management Company, and specifically their representative who deals with your Strata, or if by some chance your Strata is self-managed by its Council, then you should approach its Secretary.
Explain the problem with the sprinklers and the attempts that you’ve made to resolve it, and ask for the intervention of your Strata Management representative or your Council. Your Strata will have standard By-Laws and may even have registered additional By-Laws covering watering; you won’t know ’till you ask. The over spray may even be affecting Common Property as well as that forming part of your residence, and that too would be of interest to your Council.
If intervention doesn’t resolve the problem, then your State Legislation provides for a process of independent mediation and Orders to comply as a last resort
So you don’t need to be Superslueth and take the fight directly to your neighbour, but rather just follow the well proven and documented procedures, remain at arms length, and enjoy your new home.
No doubt one of the more unusual posts I’ve read, and maybe that’s why you’ve had no responses as yet.
Here goes……as you expected that the sprinkler problem would have been picked-up in a pre-purchase inspection I assume that those sprinklers are of the below ground gear driven pop-up variety. That being the case, most pop-up sprinklers have an adjustment to limit flow, to alter the spray area, and the ability for the nozzles to be swapped over to provide different spray patterns – just like variably adjusting a hose nozzle from a fine spray to a jet.
Even if the sprinkler’s not “fixed”, as I remember WAWA’s roster system none may be used between 9am and 6pm, so the “doctor” should have calmed and the chance of over spray reduced by the time that sprinkler use can legally commence (sorry, I forgot the forum’s no acronym rule; WAWA= Western Australian Water Authority).
Surely your neighbour would be amenable to either making those sprinkler adjustments or having them done by a irrigation contractor to make better use of WA’s groundwater resource; after all cars and lounge room windows don’t suffer from an absence of water.
Our Plan uses the proforma Notice to Comply (NTC) that’s provided (as a pdf download) on the NSW Office of Fair Trading’s website.
We’re self-managed, but the notes appended at the bottom of the proforma NTC may clarify the points being made on other posts concerning the requirement for an Executive Committee Meeting and the ability of a Strata Manager to decide (see note 2 below) to issue the NTC under a delegation forming part of their Agency Agreement with the Owners Corporation.
The relevant notes are:
1) The executive committee, or owners corporation if it has decided not to let the executive committee issue this notice, must convene and hold a meeting to decide to issue the Notice and record its decision in the minutes. Alternatively a managing agent that has been delegated the function may decide to issue a Notice.
2) The secretary or managing agent should keep a copy of this notice, and a record of the date and method of service. A strata managing agent who issues a Notice must make a written record specifying that action and the manner in which it was done and serve a copy of the record on the owners corporation.
The use of the word “decide” is interesting in terms of a Strata Manager (SM) exercising their delegated function, but to be safe I’d still ensure that the Secretary formally instructs the SM to issue the NTC concurrently with providing the details of the alleged breach incident/s and the resident’s details.
Whoever it was that asked you to remove the planter does have a point, as over time its points of attachment to the balcony railing could deteriorate and you would never know until the unlikely event occurred.
Why don’t you attach the planter to the inside of the rail, as in that way its aesthetic benefits would remain and if the unlikely event occurred the planter would only fall onto your balcony?
The only way that the tenants in our Plan ever receive their copy of our By-Laws and Special By-Laws and of the “Strata Living” publication produced by the NSW Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is when I provide it to them; both are required to be provided to tenants by Property Managers under the provisions of the NSW Residential Tenancies Act 2010 (RTA) but they never provide those documents to their tenants – ever!
The tenancy notifications to which Jimmy refers are to be provided to the Owners Corporation under S119 of the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act, and even though I’ve included a proforma of that notification as a download on our Plan’s website, Property Managers never provide that notification unless I contact them to request it when the prescribed 14 day window has lapsed – in fact most Property Managers have no idea what I’m talking about!
The RTA also requires that tenants are informed of any past “violent incidents” or significant health and safety issues involving the rental property that they’re contemplating leasing, but Property Managers don’t do that either even though information on that requirement is also a download on our Plan’s website.
With around 80% of the Units in our Plan being rented, it’s in our Owners Corporation’s interests to ensure that tenants are properly informed about what we call “the top ten challenges of Strata Living” in our Plan.
So in order to overcome slack Property Managers, every incoming tenant receives a Welcome Package, addressed to them by name once we receive the S119 notification, which includes a one-pager / double sided from the Executive Committee about those challenges (parking, noise, vehicle lights, balcony use etc), some site specific information (garbage segregation, security access operations, maintenance responsibilities etc), and copies of our By-Laws and of the OFT’s “Strata Living” publication.
The whole idea is for the O/C to assist tenants to “settle” and to give them an opportunity to do the right thing, on the basis that people generally don’t behave like idiots on purpose!
It works almost all the time, and overcomes the inadequacies of our local Property Managers who don’t know any better; but then I’ve raved on about them in numerous other posts.
Oh Daphne …… the more you dig the deeper the hole becomes!
Firstly, The (NSW) legislation the regulates the activities of people in the real estate industry is the Property Stock and Business Agent Act, and that stipulates that copies of “contracts” such as the Strata Management Agency Agreement that your Owners Corporation has with its Strata Manager have to provided to the Executive Committee (E/C) Secretary within 48 hours of being executed.
Similarly, if the Agreement is for longer than 12 months it’s usual for the charging and fee schedules (as a minimum) to be updated at the Plan’s Annual General Meeting, and again a copy of the updated document has to be provided to the Secretary.
Anyway, if the E/C Member/s with whom you’ve spoken don’t have a copy of the Agreement (or can’t find it) then your approach directly to the Strata Manager is correct, and no you shouldn’t have to pay for anything other than for photocopying.
I assume your Plan deals with an established Strata Management Business, so you may do better by writing to the Principal of that Business with a CC to your Strata Manager; sometimes the boss is unaware of grass-roots problems with individual Clients until they loose them.
PS – just read your other post about “chairing an AGM” and noted that your Plan doesn’t have a Secretary. That probably means that there’s no O/C representative noted on the Agreement either, thus giving your Strata Manager carte blanche under delegated authority. All the more reason for you to appraise the Principal with regard to your concerns at a pareto level.
Whale (1315hrs).
@basjan27 said:
The EC and current SM have interpreted Cl 34g very broadly to mean they could take whatever action, at whatever cost, without consultation.This probably won’t help you to sort out what’s happened, but just to be clear…Clause 34(g) is not open to interpretation.
What it requires is that at every General Meeting the Owners Corporation (O/C) will vote on a mandatory motion on the Agenda about whether it will, or will not give its Executive Committee (E/C) carte blanche to spend whatever amounts ($) it likes on simply everything.
If that motion was not on the Agenda, then whoever prepared it is in breach of the Act; and whilst that probably won’t help you sort out what’s happened either, I hope it assists you and the new E/C to get things back on track.
As an aside, the more I read the posts on this forum the more astounded I become at how poorly so many Strata Schemes are managed. I just hope that the NSW Government’s Strata Reform process gives birth, amongst other things, to a stronger and better resourced Office of Fair Trading who can “educate” E/C Members and Strata Managers, randomly audit the results, and cane those who offend! Does anyone think that will happen?Basjan27 – not only can an Owners Corporation impose limits on its Executive Committee’s spending, that’s actually a mandatory motion for the Agenda of every General Meeting, where those in attendance have to resolve one way or the other. As Scotty advised, any restriction can be a monetary limit or apply to a category of expenditure such as “consultants”, or be a mixture of both.
The relevant provision is Schedule 2, Cl 34(g) of the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act (1996) that states that every Meeting Agenda MUST “include a form of motion to decide if any matter or type of matter is to be determined only by the owners corporation in general meeting”.
gv – Clause 51 (1e) of the NSW Residential Tenancies Act 2010 states:
That a tenant must not cause or permit a number of persons to reside in the residential premises that exceeds any number specified in the residential tenancy agreement.
So strictly speaking YES, your Agreement could be terminated by a heartless landlord, but why don’t you just ask the Agent to include an additional person on your new Agreement? Provided the numbers of occupants doesn’t exceed the number that can reasonably accommodated in the bedrooms, Agents generally just include those numbers on the Lease don’t they?
Perhaps contact Tenants NSW for some expert advice?
All the best for the arrival of your extra “tenant”
To be fair, none of the contributors to this post has mentioned fees as an issue or self-managing a rental property to save those.
If the Principals of all the Rental / Property Management businesses that I’ve had dealings with availed themselves of the services provided by businesses such as National Property Systems, perhaps the world of strata, landlords, and tenants would be a better place
Over and out !!!!Building Managers are usually responsible for managing the maintenance and repair of the common property, controlling the use of common property by tradespersons and overseeing their activities, and sometimes for the placement of tenants in the Building.
As Building Managers cannot enforce by-laws or carry out funds-committing functions of the Owners Corporation (O/C) there should be no conflicts with the role of your Strata Manager provided your Owners Corporation has an agreed scope-of-work with the Owner concerned, and it makes sure that there are no conflicts or overlaps between that scope-of-work and those included in its Strata Management Agency Agreement.
The fact that the Owner has experience in the role is good, but your Owners Corporation needs to ensure that he holds a Licence (in NSW); not Registration as may have been the case if he worked under the control of someone holding a Licence in his previous role.
I’ve in the past been accused of “gold-plating” with regard to my approach to the O/Cs management of their Strata Plans, but as I’ve said before that’s just a euphemism for doing things properly, by the book and thereby avoiding later problems!
In that regard, the Owner would in addition to a Licence also need an ABN, may have to register for the GST, and may need liability insurance depending upon the nature of the Owners Corporation’s Building Insurance Policy.
As for conflicts with the Owner being appointed as a Building Manager whilst at the same time holding a position on the Executive Committee (E/C), there should be none but I can see some issues, perhaps perceptional with that Owner holding the position of Treasurer.
The issues of conflict may be perceptional, but your O/C could avoid those and my “gold-plating” if instead of appointing the Owner as a Building Manager they authorised him to do many of the same maintenance coordination / tradesperson supervision activities (but not tenancy activities) and perform his E/C role, and be the “nominated person” on the Strata Management Agency Agreement (i.e. the Strata Manager’s liaison/contact to coordinate acivities) and all for a combined “honorarium” paid under the provisions of S 25 of the (NSW) Strata Schemes Management Act.
As you will see from your reading of that Section of the Act, any payment to the Owner has to be resolved at a General Meeting (as for the Building Manager), and it needs to be paid 12 monthly in arrears; in other words your O/C resolves to pay the Owner for the work that he’s done as E/C Treasurer and for addition building management type duties since the previous General Meeting, and so on each successive year for the same amount ($) or varied to account for greater/lesser responsibilities and activities actually peformed.
Cosmo – I quite obviously have strong views on the subject of Rental Agents / Property Managers, and I’ve probably gone on about it enough.
But to answer your questions, the Office of Fair Trading (in NSW) has downloadable copies of Tenancy Agreements, Condition Reports, and Fact Sheets and you also can download a selection of tenancy applications from most Agents’ websites.
If Owner / Landlords hosted an “open-home”, eye-balled potential applicants, issued the application form to those, took 15 minutes to peruse each completed one received to short-list, and then spent a further 30 minutes checking referees, then they’d be doing considerably more than most Rental Agents / Property Managers would.
As for the “banned tenants’ register”, I’d suggest to you that those are severely compromised and therefore of little if any value – refer to the 6th para of my original post (#2).
I haven’t been a landlord since the ’80s, but as “rental facilitator” for each of our sons and their wives (3), and as the Sec. of a medium-sized Plan where almost 80% of Units are rented, I’d suggest to you that I get a better then average perspective of how properties are “managed” (not) from both the perspective of Owners and from Tenants.
I should reiterate that I’m referring to the performance of most Rental Agents / Property Managers as there are obviously some good and competent ones out there.
I appreciate that initiating self-management of a property is sometimes limited by distance unless there’s a “facilitator” available, however from what I’ve observed even tenants would prefer to deal directly with their Landlord – to the great benefit of both parties.