When our property market became a space race
Space: the final frontier – or, for those in the Sydney property market over the past year, the financial frontier. For the biggest trend in pandemic-plagued 2021 has turned out…
Podcast: How a lockdown had a silver lining
Are you stuck at home because state borders aren’t as open as they want us to think, or you can’t go anywhere until your covid test results come out? Maybe…
It’s party time: How to go wild but not feral
It’s safe to say that our New Year’s Eve parties will be different this year. For a start, it will be just over two weeks since social gathering restrictions in…
Time to thank the unsung heroes of strata life
Since we last met under the mistletoe, as apartment residents, we’ve found ourselves in the odd position of presenting a very specific challenge to Health authorities, whose responses lurched from…
Forum: Fight the builder or turn an blind eye?
There’s a doubly time-sensitive issue in one of our forum questions this week. An owner’s corp has forced their builder to fix some waterproofing issues but in testing the repairs,…
Online strata committee elections – the result is in
We all thought Covid-19 and Zoom meetings were behind us until Omicron emerged to scare the bejayzus out of us all over again. And with the prospect that we may…
Podcast: Tamarama drama and our new Minister
It was Monday morning and we had just finished editing the podcast when we got the word that NSW had a new Fair Trading minister. Meetings are cancelled, lunch is…
New Fair Trading Minister has scandal-plagued past
NSW appears to have a Fair Trading minister again, having ditched the cumbersome Innovation and Better Regulation title. However, it seems to also be returning the portfolio to its training…
Forum: A warning about issuing warnings
I have to admit I’m feeling unusually smug this week – but that’s what happens when you get things so precisely right it feels like there was a betting fix…
Podcast: Is this why Dave says he’s no messiah?
If there is one person in the strata sphere who’d say Building Commissioner David Chandler is not the Strata Messiah, it would be the commissioner himself. As we discuss on…
Govt. promises major strata fire safety revamp
There is a lot of confusion and anger in Strataland about fire safety, including who gets to choose what’s safe and what isn’t, and how a building that has passed…
NCAT delays force family back into mouldy unit
Unexplained delays by the NSW government’s property tribunal have forced a mother, her five-year-old daughter and her elderly parents to move back into their damp, mouldy apartment. Sarah Wu’s family…