Short shrift for airheads
Melbourne city council were due to be back at the Building Appeals Board this past week, to re-argue their case that residential apartment blocks are no place for short-term holiday…
Late call on rental damage
We came across this interesting titbit on the interweb – a couple had left their rented accommodation in May and their bond had been refunded (albeit after two months). Now…
Eye in the sky drone grounded
When an apartment resident decided to grow a “sauvage” garden on his balcony – filling it with soil and letting it grow wild – he claimed the by-laws allowed for…
Law defective on defect claims
It’s all gone quiet on the strata law reform front but that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Strata laws are one thing but the most significant legislation for new apartment…
Winners and losers in user-pays rentals
If proposed curbs on interest-only loans make life easier for people who want to buy where they live, at prices uninflated by speculators, what about tenants? Like it or not,…
Persons of interest pumping up prices
If we ever needed proof of a disconnect between the cost of building apartments and the prices at which they’re sold, it came a couple of years ago when a…
Do we need a no-tenant tax
Have Sydney’s rental vacancy rates turned the corner? With a rise in the availability of properties to 2 percent, while hardly easy, life could be getting less stressful for renters.…
Forced sales – a chance to have your say
The spectre of aged residents being hauled off to retirement homes, kicking and screaming, so that rapacious developers can turn their old apartment blocks into something shiny and new, has…
Sign up for some smart thinking
Baffled by by-laws? Confused by committees? Mystified by the multiplicity of managers in strata? Don’t worry – help is on the way. An abundance of experts are lining up to…
Sydney schedules strata skills sessions
The following is a press release from City of Sydney: With City of Sydney residents now five times more likely to be living in an apartment than the national average,…
Make yourself heard
If information is knowledge and knowledge is power, then the Owners Corporation network is certainly powering up, gathering as much information as they can about what strata residents want and…
Wild Birds: Pets or pests?
Is an animal regularly fed and cared for by a strata owner a pet? Or is it maybe, in fact, a pest? “My strata has a by-law (‘rule’ in Victoria)…