How owners and media keep a lid on problems

Our media has a strange relationship with strata issues. It’s often a passive conspiracy of silence between journalists and owners, in which secrecy, confusion, erroneous assumptions and wilful ignorance either keep important stories out of the mainstream press or present them in such a way that the significant points are overlooked.

Instead, we get “human interest” stories that present apartment living as something akin to a Stalinist gulag, where all residents are victims apart from the people on the committees who are fascist dictators.

We should be grateful – in some states at least, strata barely gets covered at all.

Meanwhile, when there are serious stories to be told, and substantiated facts are required, owners and especially investors often don’t want their apartment living woes in the headlines.

But sometimes media exposure can help; imagine what could have happened (and avoided) if the owners in Mascot Towers had alerted local and state media the first time they became aware of disturbance to their building from work on the adjoining site.

The recent tales coming out of Melbourne about the Aurora building are the exception.  And it’s not that there are no other stories – it’s just that nobody wants to tell them.

Part of the problem for journalists is that strata stories tend to be a mixture of elevated emotions and petty politics, combined with poorly understood and highly complex legal issues.

One case in point was the story last year about the elderly Sydney couple who were supposedly being driven out of their homes by an allegedly heartless strata committee ruthlessly pursuing an “unreasonable” strata levies debt. 

The yarn skimmed over the fact that the couple had stupidly been advised not to pay their share of a special levy for repairs which the owners corporation (body corporate) was legally obliged to undertake and to which they were legally required to contribute.  The penalties for non-payment were also mandatory.

The story did not mention that the reason the costs were so high in the first place was that the apartment was one of the most valuable in the building, or that there were financial assistance packages available that would have solved the problem.

Was the journalist concerned deliberately obscuring the facts?  Probably not.  They were just displaying the standard level of misunderstanding and erroneous assumption that most non-strata residents (and many owners and tenants) possess.

I recall a few years ago I was asked to go on ABC radio Newcastle to talk about pets in apartments.  The host’s opening line was “Well, we all know that pets are not allowed in unit blocks.’

It’s never a good idea to directly contradict a host on live radio, so I had to gently point out that this was a common assumption that simply wasn’t true.

Another time, I had participated in a news feature for Channel Seven on how difficult it was for apartment owners to get defects fixed in some new blocks.

The TV promo for the story was “Strata committees out of control!” Why?  Probably because the promo department lazily assumed that’s what the story must be about.  What else was there in strata?

The tragedy of all this is that when stories do get out, they can make a significant difference to people’s lives. I can think of at least two strata news stories that have directly had laws changed in NSW to the benefit of owners and investors, with knock-on effects in other states.

To be fair, apartment owners are often reluctant to parade their woes in newspapers, on TV and online, fearing the obvious effect on their property prices.

Investors are especially shy of shining a light on their issues, partly because they don’t have to live in the conditions that may have driven resident owners to distraction, and partly becasue they might want to sell before damage is done to the property price.

That’s why Flat Chat has mostly operated on the basis of anonymity.  Naming neither the victims nor the perpetrators allows us to tell the stories that others can’t or won’t touch.

Strata stories do get a run in NSW these days, but the too-hard basket is a still a black hole in Victoria, Queensland and elsewhere.

Or maybe we don’t read too many strata horror stories there because everything is hunky-dory in their strata schemes.  But I wouldn’t bet your flat on it.

A version of this column first appeared in the Australian Financial Review.