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…
Why you don’t want your managers to be too cozy
If there was ever proof needed of the naivete of prospective apartment owners – and the expectation of developers that new apartment buyers don’t know their assets from a hole…
OCN seminar to show the way through strata maze
We don’t need to tell Flat Chat readers that living in strata is complicated – you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t already found that out for yourselves. And for…
Roundup: When business bags your parking spots
The often irreconcilable differences between strata residents and commercial operators in the same scheme are to the fore in the Flat Chat Forum this week, with two tales with sadly…
Balcony smokers in your top three strata gripes
The results of our recent poll are in – not as definitive as a general election but more accurate than Peter Dutton’s guesstimate of his support – and there is…
Cladding crisis: Who pays for rip down and replacement?
The flammable cladding crisis is not going away any time soon and very different approaches from our two most populous states don’t make the solution any clearer. More than 400 high-rise…
POLL: If you had three strata wishes …
Most of us like living in strata most of the time. We know this because we vote with our wallets and purses, and the median cost of buying and renting…
Roundup: Revealing neighbours and palace coups
There are a couple of issues of an … um … delicate nature in this week’s crop of posts to the Forum. In one, a Flatchatter asks if residents can…
Airbnb laws fail as high-rise party gang riots and robs
Deep flaws in the Victorian government’s laissez faire short-term holiday letting laws were exposed at the weekend when a groups of partying teenagers ran riot in a Melbourne Airbnb rental,…