Meetings are boring and owners corporation annual general meetings can be more so than most. However, if you have just handed over your savings and your first-time home owners grant for a nice new apartment, that shouldn’t put you off attending the first AGM of your new apartment block
This where the course of the building’s future is set for the next ten years. You can and should have a say in what goes on because if mistakes are made here, you will be paying for them financially and socially for a decade at least.
It really is that important, which is why it’s a crying shame that many owners don’t bother to attend and others come out saying “what just happened?”
Good question. Worst-case, you and your neighbours will have just signed away your right to have any real control over your own homes, while paying through the nose for the privilege of being duped.
Glass half full, there’s a very good chance you have voted for – or not voted against – contracts and agreements the details of which are as alien to you as rocket surgery.
Got a pet? Sorry, you just agreed on by-laws that ban them. Want to keep levies under control? That’s a shame because you just voted to endorse a management agreement that gives your caretaker a guaranteed income of $150,000 a year, regardless of how good or bad a job they are doing.
The law in NSW perfectly reasonably says that no contracts, understandings or by-laws mean anything until they are endorsed at the first Annual General Meeting.
What the law doesn’t say is that everybody should be aware of what they are voting for or against, so that first AGM is often merely an illusion of choice.
How can someone get you to agree to something that benefits them, disadvantages you and costs you money? Easy! By telling you, the first-time, wide-eyed, happy home owner that it’s “standard practice”.
So over the next few weeks, Flat Chat will be devoted to alerting new owners to the traps that await the unwary. All you have to do is vote “yes” by reading next week’s Domain. It’s standard practice, honest.