Rapid response law to curb holiday let horrors
Noosa Shire Council is about to become the first council in Queensland, if not Australia, to insist on holiday letting landlords having a rapid response system in place to deal…
Forum: Time to rewrite strata manager contracts?
The standard strata management agreement – as issued by Strata Community Australia – is a brute of a document. And while it’s not an mandatory form as, for instance, the…
Podcast: Where should strata be in government?
This week on the pod we ask the question, if Strata doesn’t belong in Fair Trading, then where should it go? As Jimmy explains in this column (which also appeared…
What the pandemic has taught us about ourselves
There’s a quirky UK comedy series on TV called Taskmaster, in which five comedians are set a series of bizarre physical and logical challenges, usually with hilarious results. At the…
Apartment blocks getting wired-up about EVs
Apartment buildings throughout Australia are racing to install electric vehicle-charging systems in their garages even though many still have no electric car-owners – or, at most, just one, writes Sue…
Airbnb ‘won’t name renter of trashed unit to police’
Just a few weeks since the much-vaunted short-term letting register and code of conduct became law, Riot Squad police have twice been called in to break up violent and destructive…
Strata isn’t fixed – and it’s in the wrong ministry
When Dominic Perrottet announced his new cabinet last week, it wasn’t the changes at the top that drew most attention from apartment owners and strata professionals. It was one near…
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,…