Why untrained volunteers run big bucks budgets
They oversee annual budgets of millions of dollars, make decisions that have profound influence on the lives of hundreds of people, pursue policies that could have devastating effects on the…
Roundup: Should neighbours be given your email address?
Do you guard your email address like it’s a secret code to your bank account. Or do you spread it around like confetti? One of the recurring questions on the…
New laws to crack down on dodgy certifiers
Somewhere in the dim but not-so distant past, I recall the government saying it was going to introduce severe penalties for building certifiers who fibbed and gave the Ok the…
Business booms in blocking illegal Airbnbs
What would most Flatchatters change first about their apartment blocks if they had three magic wishes? Make it harder for people to let out their entire flat through Airbnb, was…
Revealed – the top ten most expensive dogs
Considering Flat Chat pretty much owes its existence to pets, maybe we should give them a little more space on our pages. Just to explain, we moved into a new…
Blocks get together to fight crippling cladding bills
Apartment owners facing bills of as much as $60,000 per unit to fix flammable cladding are being invited to join together in an effort to force developers to foot the…
How a sense of security can keep Airbnb at bay
In a number of surveys over the years, one of the top reasons people have given for choosing to live in apartments is security. If being safe in your own…
Have anti-pet by-laws been binned by NCAT?
There’s been a lot of fluff and kerfuffle around the recent publishing of an NCAT decision from earlier this year concerning a little dog called Baxter and an owners corp…
Roundup: Are you being locked out of cheaper power bills?
Are you being balked whenever you try to take advantage of some of the competitive offers from power companies? It seems some developers and a few not very smart strata…
Your nuttiest strata committee is now a podcast
Podcasts are all the rage these days, it seems. So we bought the microphone, downloaded the software and attended the seminar – all we needed to create a podcast was…
Dardanelle Towers: Episode 1 – The Naked Truth
We recently discovered what seem to be reports from an apartment block with more than its fair share of idiosyncratic characters. Is this place real, or a figment of someone’s…
Strata lender set to finance cladding fixes
Australia’s leading strata loan company has offered to lend the money to allow every strata building in Australia to go ahead with removal and replacement of flammable cladding,m regardless of…