Podcast: Future bright but present tense

Having been to more conferences that they’ve had Ubereats deliveries – and with drawers full of lanyards to prove it – Jimmy and Sue headed off to the Gold Coast last week to the Strata Impact conference full of hope that this wouldn’t either be another whinge-fest (not least because JT was MC).

In fact, it turned out to be absolutely fascinating with all sorts of interesting research from why the wrong apartments are built in the wrong places, to why new buildings are infested with mould and, along the way, how to deal with disruptive committee members using tried and tested psychology.

Both of us were impressed by presentations on amazing whizz-bang technology that allows you to get a 3D, virtual reality, fully detailed and inspectable images of your apartment block for about the same as it costs to have a bloke in a hard hat wander round with a clipboard.

You can read more about the conference here but it’s worth a listen to discover what got Jimmy and Sue excited about our strata future, and alarmed about how things are now, in almost equal measure.

That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.

Transcript In Full

Jimmy  00:00

Academics are funny people. Don’t you find they’re kind of different, they’re different kind of breed.

Sue Williams  00:05

Well, they are incredibly earnest, I guess. But then I suppose if you’re doing lots of research, it would make you earnest.

Jimmy  00:11

As you know, we were at a conference last week, and there was a lot of academics and some of the really interesting research and scary results that they’ve discovered. So we’re going to talk about the conference and some of the amazing and often alarming things that those academics brought to the table. I’m Jimmy Thomson. I write the flat chat column for the Australian Financial Review,

Sue Williams  00:34

And I’m Sue Williams, and I write about property for domain the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age and the AFR.

Jimmy  00:39

And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.

Sue Williams  00:55

My favorite academic, really from that was Professor Cathy Sherry.

Jimmy  00:59

Cathy Sherry,

Sue Williams  01:00

Yes, she did the first

Jimmy  01:01

Whose name I forgot, the first. I have known her for 100 years.

Sue Williams  01:06

That was horrendous. Jimmy, to be honest, Jimmy was emceeing the conference.

Jimmy  01:10

Yeah, I was doing really well

Sue Williams  01:11

He was doing great. He told everybody where the toilets were and where the emergency exits were, and he did an acknowledgement of country. Everything was flawless, until he had to present the first guest, Professor Carrie Cathy Shelley, who Sherry,

Jimmy  01:24

Can’t say it. You can’t say a word

Sue Williams  01:26

Professor Cathy Sherry, who we both know really well. And he stood on the podium and said, My first guest is and then he went blank.

Jimmy  01:34

I went blank, totally blank. I just it was, it was a Joe Biden moment.

Sue Williams  01:39

Oh, dear,

Jimmy  01:41

Yeah.

Sue Williams  01:42

And I was thinking maybe I could cause a distraction in the audience or something to try and

Jimmy  01:47

Like setting fire to the person next to you.

Sue Williams  01:51

And I thought, Should I shout out to you? Her name,

Jimmy  01:54

Get off the stage.

Sue Williams  01:57

But after that, that blip, it was okay. You were great for the rest of it,

Jimmy  02:01

A day and a half, absolutely exhausted by the end of it, just totally done in but you don’t realize. You think, Well, I’m just standing up and talking,

Sue Williams  02:09

Yeah,

Jimmy  02:09

No your brain is working overtime, if at all,

Sue Williams  02:15

the adrenaline is pumping, and then afterwards you just have this enormous let down where you’re exhausted. Yep.

Jimmy  02:21

So Professor Cathy Sherry, what was it that she said that got you so interested?

Sue Williams  02:27

Well, she was talking about how the housing crisis really and homelessness and the lack of affordable and social housing all around the country,

Jimmy  02:34

Yeah,

Sue Williams  02:34

And how strata developments are going to be, hopefully, the panacea, panacea, panacea. Thank you for all of that. I mean, you know, if we’re going to build more homes, we’re going to have to build more strata apartments. Yeah, and it was a really impassioned presentation, which I really liked, because some academics can be quite

Jimmy  02:52

Boring

Sue Williams  02:53

Academic. And yeah, she was, she was talking about how it was such a shame that, you know, young people are really dependent on the bank of mum and dad. Because if you’ve got a wealthy bank of mum and dad, that’s great, but if you don’t, you’re behind the eight ball right from the very beginning,

Jimmy  03:10

She used she quoted Alan Kohler, the ABC economist, something he’d written where he said that his father, when he bought their first house paid three and a half times his annual salary. And when he Alan bought he and his wife’s first house, he paid three and a half times his annual salary. His kids, who you can assume are reasonably well educated and have pretty good jobs, are having to pay seven and a half times their annual salary to get a house. And it’s just awful, you know, it’s but you know, Cathy is a socialist to her core, which I say we’re not in America. It’s not an insult. It’s, it’s a it’s a belief that founded in the principle of to each according to their need from each according to their ability to provide.

Sue Williams  04:08

Well, she will. She calls herself a left leaning academic, doesn’t she?

Jimmy  04:11

Yeah, okay, that’ll cover it anyway. She was saying that she thinks it’s awful that her kids could benefit from the wealth that she’s created, when other kids who might be smarter are going to have are going to be stuck at the bottom of the pile because their parents haven’t been able to be the Bank of mum and dad and the rest of it.

Sue Williams  04:34

And it was interesting, a new report came out the other day that now for an average Australian income earner to save 20% of their income for a 20% deposit, it takes an average of five and a half years.

Jimmy  04:46

Wow.

Sue Williams  04:47

Now you think, if you’re saving up, if you don’t have the Bank of mum and dad, if you’re saving up that 20% in five and a half years, how much higher will prices have risen? Yeah, so then it’s going to take you even longer. And. like can never catch up, I think, in that situation.

Jimmy  05:02

So Kathy had some pretty radical solutions. Get rid of negative gearing. She said, for a start, another thing would be to stop she was quite dismissive of first time home owner grants.

Sue Williams  05:15

Yeah. Well, a lot of people are because they say that it just pushes up the price by as much as the grant.

Jimmy  05:19

Yeah. I mean, the first thing that the developers did as soon as the grant came out was to raise their prices by exactly the amount of the grant. That’s right. So, you know, it’s one of these things where you think she sounds really smart, she is really smart, and the solutions sound really

Sue Williams  05:35

Convincing,

Jimmy  05:36

Convincing and possible and plausible. Are they ever going to be enacted by government, because as soon as one side says, we’re going to cut this and we’re going to do that, the other side goes, No, this is a bad thing. It’s going to be the end of civilization as we know it.

Sue Williams  05:51

That’s right, because some of those solutions are bound to be unpopular with some people, like negative gearing. You know, loads of people have investment places, and they want to have them in negatively geared. So it takes a government with real courage and strength of purpose, really, to introduce those changes. And because we change governments with incredible regularity,

Jimmy  06:12

Yes,

Sue Williams  06:12

Only three years, federal elections,

Jimmy  06:15

Ridiculous.

Sue Williams  06:15

It’s very hard for any government to enact unpopular legislation that will stay however wise it is,

Jimmy  06:21

Yeah, yeah. Well, we saw that was the carbon tax scare campaign that the Liberals ran and drove Julia Gillard out of office, basically on the back of that. I mean, the one thing that strikes me as being typical of how politics really doesn’t help people, Jacinda Arden in in

Sue Williams  06:43

New Zealand.

Jimmy  06:43

In New Zealand, came up with a policy where anybody born after a certain date could not ever smoke. You couldn’t they couldn’t buy cigarettes. Nobody could give them cigarettes. And it wasn’t depriving anybody of anything, because they weren’t supposed to be smoking anyway, before they were 16, and people around the world went, Wow, what a fantastic way to stop people smoking. And then she lost the election, and the National Party, or whoever, they

Sue Williams  07:10

Wound everything back.

Jimmy  07:11

Well, they said, Oh, we will lose too much revenue. So they just scrapped the whole idea,

Sue Williams  07:17

Incredibly short sighted, because then they’re going to lose all that revenue in health costs later on, when these young people end up with their health

Jimmy  07:24

But 40 years later, when all these politicians have gone and they don’t care what’s happened to the people. So yeah, so that’s politics, and politics intervenes. But it was really interesting and refreshing to hear her talk about all these failed solutions and just got a little bit of a sense of despair that nobody’s actually going to come up with anything. And she got stuck into the Queensland people as well because of the pre sale of management contracts. I mean, one of the guys there, who’s actually a really nice guy and a really smart lawyer, said the reason they have pre sales of management contracts in Queensland is because apartment owners couldn’t be trusted to run their own buildings.

Sue Williams  08:03

(laughs)

Jimmy  08:04

You know,

Sue Williams  08:05

Which didn’t go down very well did it?

Jimmy  08:06

Well, Kathy said it doesn’t matter. It’s their building. Let them do what they want. Yeah, absolutely. So, so there’s a real fundamental difference of opinions. So she was good, and she kicked things off really well.

Jimmy  08:24

Who else jumps out at you as having got the message across and that message being interesting?

Sue Williams  08:30

Sure, it was that guy, Dr Tim law, who was talking about moisture related start, strata, defects,

Jimmy  08:37

Mould

Sue Williams  08:37

Yeah, and that was really alarming. I thought,

Jimmy  08:40

Well, he pointed out that mould spores exist like even before the houses are built, they’re in the walls and all he said it’s just add water. Just add water, and mould will appear. And showed us all these very graphic images and graphic images of half built homes with the cladding for the walls, the internal cladding in the walls, sitting in the rain, you know, just, just add water, as he said. But he had this interesting thing, the four dog solution, the four dog defense, which, I think he said, was the tobacco industry, which is basically, my dog doesn’t bite my dog didn’t bite you. My dog bit you, but it didn’t hurt you, or it’s your fault that my dog bit you.

Sue Williams  09:01

(laughs)

Jimmy  09:13

And you apply that to so many things, I mean, defects in buildings, they’ll use the four dog solutions.

Sue Williams  09:37

Absolutely, not a defect. It’s not a problem

Jimmy  09:40

You caused it

Sue Williams  09:41

Yeah, that’s right. We’ve been through all that, I guess. Yeah.

Jimmy  09:44

So he was interesting.

Sue Williams  09:46

He was and one of the presentations I really liked, and I think this could probably attract quite a lot of people, was that organizational psychologist, Rob Newman.

Jimmy  09:55

Yeah,

Sue Williams  09:55

He talked about dysfunctional personalities in meetings and how to manage them. And I think we’ve all been to, well, we’ve very rarely ever been to a meeting without a dysfunctional personality, and so

Jimmy  10:05

They don’t realize they’re dysfunctional,

Sue Williams  10:07

You

Jimmy  10:07

Me

Sue Williams  10:08

Or me,

Jimmy  10:08

Me, They don’t realize they’re dysfunctional. But he we did a little test with him what kind of personality we were, and I was a disruptive I can’t remember what the

Sue Williams  10:21

Influencer,

Jimmy  10:22

Influencer! Yeah, that was a nice word for it. But basically, I was the kind of person who will go into a meeting and start talking about stuff and then go off at a tangent and come up with all sorts of crazy ideas that might be interesting, but they’re not relevant.

Sue Williams  10:36

And bizarrely, I came out exactly the same. Yeah, an influencer, but it was so interesting. We had to, you know, we had to answer lots of questions and stuff, and then work out which personality type we were and and then we had to talk to the person next to you. And the guy next to me was a strata manager, I think, from Victoria, and he said he came out as a B personality, which was

Jimmy  11:00

The team player?

Sue Williams  11:01

Yep,

Jimmy  11:02

Yep

Sue Williams  11:02

And so as I said, Oh, that’s really interesting. You said, No, but it’s not true. I’m not a team player. I think I’m an influencer, so I’m going to become an influencer. And I was like, you can’t change the rules

Jimmy  11:12

Cant cheat

Sue Williams  11:13

I was appalled, but it was, it was actually really interesting. And he was talking about different tools to manage different personality types. You know, how you can kind of mediate between them, yeah, how you can repeat their conversations back at them?

Jimmy  11:28

Well, that was the thing that struck me. He said that most people in any discussion, in any meeting, just want to feel they’ve been listened to. They don’t necessarily want to be you know, have everybody say, “That’s a brilliant idea. Let’s follow that.” And the one way to make people feel that they’ve been listened to is to repeat what they’ve said back to them. And you’ll get some people who will just keep saying the same thing over and over and over again. And one way to stop them doing that is to say, okay, so what you’re saying is this, we’ve got it.

Sue Williams  12:01

Yeah, absolutely.

Jimmy  12:02

I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah, are

Sue Williams  12:04

you going to do a story on that for the website?

Jimmy  12:07

I could,

Sue Williams  12:08

I think that was really valuable.

Jimmy  12:09

I didn’t take any notes, so I was too busy forgetting my names of my friends. When we come back, we’re going to talk about defects. That’s after this.

Sue Williams  12:24

Yeah, there was somebody talking about different ways to discover defects, wasn’t it? It was really illuminating.

Jimmy  12:29

It was it was interesting. I mean, I, as you know, I’m a bit of a geek, and I do love my little computer toys and whatnot. But this was somebody who was talking about how you can use 3d imaging and stuff like that, and they and somebody else came in later to show how sophisticated that is these days, but showing how we kind of don’t get most of the defects that. I mean, we know there are defects in buildings, but the way they break down is quite astonishing. Really,

Sue Williams  13:01

We don’t discover the defects.

Jimmy  13:02

We don’t discover the defects.

Sue Williams  13:04

That’s right, because he was talking about this 3d imaging, yes, and saying how they could do the image of a whole building,

Jimmy  13:12

Yeah,

Sue Williams  13:13

And then work out all the defects for $20,000 yes, which was incredible, because if you had, I mean, expert reports and things usually cost you. Oh, God, you know, yeah, 50,000 at least, really

Jimmy  13:25

Well, they had this thing. I mean, I’ve seen it used for real estate agents have used it to show the interiors of apartments, and they stick a camera type device in the middle of a room, and it scans the whole room, and then software that they use tells the operator where to put the camera next. And then they link it all together. And you can actually walk through the 3D image of the apartment and even pointing out that, you know, okay, you can get a plan of an apartment, you know, on a page or a computer screen, but most people are not trained how to read that properly. It’s not an instinctive thing that you see, whereas a 3D image, or, even better, a video that you can walk through will give you a really good sense of what’s going on. But he had taken it a stage further, and he was using thermal imaging, I think, as well,

Sue Williams  14:17

Oh, that’s right, yeah,

Jimmy  14:18

To show where there was places that were hot, that shouldn’t be hot, and stuff like that. And it was absolutely remarkable, and could be a game changer in terms of people being able to rather than, as he said, rather than having a guy walking around with a clipboard looking at stuff that seems obvious to be a defect, but not knowing what is behind that, then you’ve got this, this technology that gives you a much better idea of how things are and how they should be.

Sue Williams  14:50

Yeah, in the actual structure, isn’t it really, behind the internal walls and things, you can actually see what’s happening. And he was using the thermal imaging, virtual reality, AI and lots of drone technologies so they could fly around the building

Jimmy  15:05

And over, especially when roof waterproofing is such a big issue in a lot of buildings, to be able to fly something over the building, take thermal imaging, or just any imaging, and see and because the cameras are so sensitive, they can pick up the tiniest little cracks where cracks ain’t supposed to be.

Sue Williams  15:25

Yeah, I thought that was quite miraculous, really, in lots of ways. I mean, I didn’t understand it all. I think probably lots of people didn’t quite understand it all, but it just showed that, you know, defects technology is coming ahead on leaps and bounds, really.

Jimmy  15:45

The next speaker was Dr Nicole Johnson, who she brought the whole conference together. It was her thing. And she was talking about fire safety and her lack thereof, and pointed out stuff. I mean, she had some really interesting videos. But one of the things that she said, basically was the way apartments are designed in terms of fire safety, is that every room is a sealed unit, so that, you know, if the room next door catches fire, then

Sue Williams  16:14

It won’t spread.

Jimmy  16:15

It won’t spread, or significantly, the smoke won’t spread. And then she showed us videos of how the smoke does spread.

Sue Williams  16:22

Oh, they were scary, weren’t they,

Jimmy  16:24

Yeah,

Sue Williams  16:25

It’s just this black smoke billowing, yeah, in a home. And then further along the corridor, the same smoke was billowing,

Jimmy  16:33

Was coming out of the air vents and things.

Sue Williams  16:35

Oh, my God.

Jimmy  16:36

And I’ve kind of blended a lot of these discussions into the one series of thoughts. But I mean, somebody pointed out it may have been heard that if you take a fire resistant wall and stick a pipe through it, it’s the equivalent of putting a bone through skin. And you know what people are doing is they build the apartment and the room is fireproof, and then plumber comes along and says, Well, I need to put a pipe through here, so they cut a hole in the wall and put the pipe through, and that wall is no longer fire safe, yeah,

Sue Williams  17:07

And lots of people doing renovations do similar things,

Jimmy  17:09

Yes, indeed, indeed. So

Sue Williams  17:12

It was actually quite alarming, wasn’t it?

Jimmy  17:13

It was

Sue Williams  17:14

I mean, the defects, talk the talk about moisture and black mold, and then the fire thing. It was kind of a bit overwhelming in some ways.

Jimmy  17:23

And Bruce Mackenzie, he pointed out that when they did their surveys, 37% of the defects were fire ordnances.

Sue Williams  17:33

That’s huge, isn’t it?

Jimmy  17:34

Well it’s more than a third, and it’s all kind of little things. He showed a picture of a fire exit door, which had a canopy over it that didn’t allow the door to open,

Sue Williams  17:45

Gosh,

Jimmy  17:45

So the door would only open two inches or six inches, but no further. And apparently he said, when this was pointed out to the people in the building these they said, Well, it’s been like that for years. You know? It’s like

Sue Williams  17:58

So That’s okay then, yeah, but there was some film of Grenfell towers, and there, obviously we’ve had issues. And you talked about a building where the residents created issue as well.

Jimmy  18:11

It was in the Bronx. It was a really sad, really, really sad story. I mean, it was not the biggest fire or, you know, disaster by any means, but it was just so believably real that there was a fire started in a lower floor apartment, and the guy grabbed his kids and got them out, which is great, but he left the front door open because apparently the automatic closure on the front door had been taken off because people didn’t want the door slamming and stuff like that, and so the smoke came out of his apartment and went up the stairwell, went up the fire stairs because two fire doors had been left open. So the fire stairs, instead of protecting people till they got to the ground, became a chimney for all the toxic smoke from a burning sofa.

Sue Williams  18:56

Yeah, absolutely

Jimmy  18:57

And 17 people died, including children, because they got into the fire state or thinking they would be safe. And in fact, it was the worst thing they could have done, because people had jammed fire doors open.

Sue Williams  19:09

Yeah, and we’ve had that case here where the residents in an apartment building, they they kind of had it subdivided so they could put more people, getting their students and people without, not without much money. And so when fire came, they just couldn’t get out. Yeah, because there were no exits

Jimmy  19:27

Exactly, exactly. I mean, that’s how you know that some of these big fire disasters, like in nightclubs and things, it’s when they discovered that the fire doors have been locked shut to stop people getting in illegally,

Sue Williams  19:39

Sure,

Jimmy  19:40

Or factories, things like that. It was interesting. There was a kind of hypothetical, don’t know if you remember Jeffrey Robertson’s hypotheticals.

Sue Williams  19:50

Of course I do

Jimmy  19:51

Amanda Farmer led that. And that was quite funny, because, I mean, she was basically saying, you know, it started off. Was reports it was supposed to be a committee meeting, and reports of a leak. Water is leaking from a burst hose, and one of the panelists, Nicole wild, she just immediately said, shut the water off for the building. Get it fixed.

Sue Williams  20:18

She was great, wasn’t she, kind of recited all these things that should happen immediately. Yeah. And was a really impressive strata management.

Jimmy  20:27

Yeah, yeah it was

Sue Williams  20:28

Exactly.

Jimmy  20:29

Although, ironically, our water was turned off the next morning in the hotel. We thought, It’s her, she’s done it. But yeah, one of the things they said was, people don’t know where the stopcock is in their apartments. They you know, there’s usually a tap, maybe in the laundry, under the sink. If there’s water pouring out of somewhere that water shouldn’t be pouring out of, that’s where you got to find it. Most people, or many people, don’t know this, including your niece, who called me up one day and she had turned off the water to her entire house from outside because the pipe had burst under the sink. And I was able to talk her through on the phone, saying, look under the sink. Okay, move the bottles. And can you see, can you see a tap? And, oh yeah, there’s a tap there. Turn it now, turn the water back on, and everything was fine after that simple stuff, if you know it, but if you don’t know it, it’s just a disaster. Yeah,

Sue Williams  21:27

Certainly,

Jimmy  21:34

There was a jurisdictional legal review where we had a strata lawyer from five different states there, and that was really interesting, because I didn’t realize this, but the ACT, which is not a state, of course, it’s a territory, has these radical new development laws that basically hold

Sue Williams  21:57

Put the onus on the developer to prove that something isn’t a defect,

Jimmy  22:01

Yeah? Rather than

Sue Williams  22:02

incredible,

Jimmy  22:03

yeah.

Sue Williams  22:04

Why isn’t everywhere like that? Really? That would be fantastic, but I don’t think it’s been tried in court yet, has it?

Jimmy  22:10

And Gary Bugden, the venerable Gary Bugden, who’s like one of

Sue Williams  22:14

The founder of strata law.

Jimmy  22:16

He invented strata loan. He asked the relevant question, Does this mean that developers will not develop in Canberra anymore? And you know, they asked, Why do you think Canberra is so advanced? I mean, it was way behind everybody else for a long time, and now it’s jumped to the head in terms of the power of their legislation. And they asked, Why is Canberra so effective in getting these laws changed. So the lawyer, as Susan Proctor, was asked, How come Canberra can get this done when nobody else can? And she said two things, it’s a small government area and a very educated population,

Jimmy  22:40

So that people are already aware that the law should be working in ways that it hadn’t been, and they were close enough in terms of politics to get to the politicians and say, You got to fix this. So it’s not going to work for everybody, but it does show a way ahead,

Sue Williams  22:57

Wow,

Sue Williams  23:15

Sure.

Jimmy  23:16

So there was a day and a half of talking about strata and leaping around and networking furiously. And it was, you know, the thing about and I was slagging off academics at the beginning of this, and I shouldn’t have been, because there’s a lot of really interesting research going on. The question is, is anybody listening? Yeah, is anybody who can change things?

Sue Williams  23:39

Do they have enough places where they can publicize this research, really?

Jimmy  23:43

Yeah, I mean, they were talking about the efficacy of our New South Wales Building Commission and David Chandler and all the good work he’s doing. And somebody pointed out that, compared to the Strata Commissioner John Minns, David Chandler has between three and 400 staff. John Mintz has four, four people on his staff. And so a lot of these things, for the time being, are not going to get fixed. But, you know, we live in hope. Okay,

Sue Williams  24:13

Fantastic. And they’re hoping that that kind of conference might happen every year from now on, which will be great, if it can.

Jimmy  24:20

I think Nicole is remember, we remember the Griffith conferences from days gone by, where a lot of people, but they tended to be dominated by, dare I say it, strata managers and companies that were selling their wares, whereas this was very much about ideas and forward thinking. And, you know, it has been pointed out that there weren’t an awful lot of owners there, but then owners can get their own thing. You know, the owners are all part of the same picture, but when you get down to the research and the theory, you really don’t want somebody coming along and saying, How can I fix the leak in my bathroom?

Sue Williams  24:58

Absolutely, yeah, I. No, it was fantastic. Thank you, Nicole, for the conference.

Jimmy  25:02

Yes,

Sue Williams  25:02

Really enjoyed it.

Sue Williams  25:03

Thank you all the speakers. You were all good in your own way, and that’s I think we’ve said enough

Sue Williams  25:11

Absolutely.

Jimmy  25:12

 So Thank you Sue,

Sue Williams  25:13

OK

Jimmy  25:14

Again, and thank you all for listening. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye.

Jimmy  25:20

Thanks for listening to the Flat Chat Wrap podcast. You’ll find links to the stories and other references on our website, flatchat.com.au and if you haven’t already done so, you can subscribe to this podcast completely free on Apple podcast Spotify, or your favorite pod catcher. Just search for Flat Chat Wrap with a W. Click on Subscribe, and you’ll get this podcast every week without even trying. Thanks again. Talk to you again next week.