Podcast: Would you share a flat with Boomers?

In this week’s podcast we ask how over-50s would cope with having to share homes again.  Sure it would help with loneliness and isolation, as well as helping with the cost of living.  But what would other Boomers do that drove you mad?

Is it the food stealing and lack of hygiene of our youth, come back to haunt us? Or having to deal with other people as set in their ways as you are?

Or would it give you a whole new lease of life with reduced living costs and a built-in bunch of new friends?

On a more serious note, we ask why it is that, while the so-called Arrow decision has established that pre-sale strata contracts are invalid, some developers can get away with signing them.

As raised by our friend Francesco Andreone at GoStrata, what needs to be done to the laws to stop this pernicious exploitation of strata owners’ lack of knowledge and experience? 

And why do we apartment owners have to risk our money in taking developers to court to re-litigate these cases every time they turn up?

And finally, Flat Chat has a new media outlet and a whole new readership (we hope) who have missed out on our 20 years of fighting the good fight for strata owners and residents.

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

Transcript in Full

Jimmy

Everybody seems to be coming back from holidays.

Sue

Yes, it’s kind of back to normal and it’s so hot in Sydney, isn’t it?

Jimmy

So this week we are going to talk about our friend Francesco Andreoni has written something about the Arrow case.

Sue

Oh yeah, that old legal case.

Jimmy

The legal case that establishes the fact that your developer cannot sign too many contracts before you take possession. We’re going to talk about house sharing because that’s apparently a thing for older people.

Sue

Oh, they buy apartments and move in together.

Jimmy

Or somebody has an apartment and they’ve got a couple of spare rooms and they say, well come and share with me and share some of the cost.

Sue

That’s interesting.

Jimmy

And you can find FlatChat on a completely new outlet for everyone.

Sue

Exciting.

Jimmy

It is.

Sue

So it’s still on the FlatChat website.

Jimmy

Still on the FlatChat website.

Sue

That’s not going to change.

Jimmy

But we have a new media platform that you might find different stuff on.

Sue

Oh yes.

Jimmy

Yeah, so we’ll talk about that. I’m Jimmy Thomson. I edit the flatchat.com.au website.

Sue

And I’m Sue Williams. And I write about property for the Sydney Money Herald, The Age, The AFR and Domain.

Jimmy

And this is the FlatChat Rap. So Francesco at Gostrata has been writing about the Arrow ruling.

Sue

Remind us what that was. I remember it from years ago, but I can’t really remember.

Jimmy

Well, basically Arrow was, I think, either a developer or, yeah, I think it was a developer. And anyway, they went to court with their owners over contracts that they had signed with providers before the first AGM. And it was established in either the High Court or the Supreme Court that the developer cannot sign any contracts before the first AGM or more to the point, any contracts that were signed before the first AGM have to be ratified at the first AGM.

Sue

And it was kind of a huge landmark judgment at the time, wasn’t it?

Jimmy

Absolutely. I mean, it’s like, for instance, it’s very different from the situation in Queensland where the developer can actually sell management rights and things like that. In New South Wales and Victoria, the developer cannot sign contracts that aren’t ratified at the first AGM.

Now, the problem is a lot of people turning up at the first AGM have no idea what’s going on.

Sue

And they just say yes to everything, really.

Jimmy

And if their strata manager has put these contracts in the folder for approval at the first AGM, they kind of assume that they must be okay. As we have found, well, we’ve known this for years, but as we’ve found in the past year or so, you cannot necessarily trust every strata manager to do the right thing for the owners, partly because their long-term livelihood depends on the goodwill of developers. So Francesco has been writing about this and I’ll let people track that down, gostrata.com.au, I think it is, whatever it is, look for Go Strata. It’s an interesting situation because, yeah, the law on it is now clear, but it’s not illegal for developers to do this in terms of there is no criminal penalty for doing it. So owners still have to take the developers to court. And that’s a huge impost on a lot of people.

Sue

And I think Francesco is saying, why is this situation still happening? Because we had this landmark judgment a while ago. So really, this shouldn’t really be an issue anymore.

But you’re saying, well, it still goes on with these contracts.

Jimmy

He’s quite right. Now, the new legislation that’s supposedly going through Parliament right now is going to make it harder for developers to do this. And it’s also going to bring strata law and contracts, strata contracts under consumer law, which is federal.

But it really has to be much clearer. I mean, I’m 100% with Francesco on this. It has to be much clearer to developers why they shouldn’t do it.

Like there has to be a penalty.

Sue

Because the trouble is, if they do this kind of stuff, owners are in the right, but they actually have to take the matter to court, don’t they?

Jimmy

Yeah.

Sue

And they have to pay all the court costs. They have to get a vote, their AGM or a special…

Jimmy

Which is hard because a lot of people don’t want to get involved in any legal stuff because it’s a bit of a gamble.

Sue

Yeah. And for good reason, it’s expensive too. So they have to go through all that anxiety and cost.

Jimmy

Yeah. When everybody knows what’s right and what’s wrong.

Sue

Yeah.

Jimmy

I mean, it’s a bit like you get mugged in the street and you know who did it. And then the police say, yeah, well, you’d better sue that person because we’re not going to do anything.

Sue

Yep.

Jimmy

So, you know, you’re getting mugged at your AGM by the developer often, but not always, in cahoots with the strata manager and they can say, well, you know, if you’re not happy, take us to court. And that is just grossly unfair because they’ve, generally speaking, have a lot more money.

Sue

Yeah, sure. And a lot more time, a lot more expertise.

Jimmy

And then when you do get a judgment against them, they just fold up and go and start another business under another name.

Sue

Sure.

Jimmy

I mean, it’s so weighted against the apartment owners. It’s a wonder anybody buys apartments in this country. And the reason that people do is because they don’t know how vulnerable they are.

Sue

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. And with that situation, you know, there’s no win, no fee lawyers.

I wonder if you could take one of those to take a case for you?

Jimmy

The problem with that might be that, you know, you go in, let’s say you’ve got serious defects that are going to cost a million dollars to fix. So that would be worth going to court over.

Sue

Yep.

Jimmy

Or the contracts that you’ve been signed up for are going to cost you half a million dollars that you shouldn’t be paying. If you go to a no win, no fee lawyer, you have to pay them out of your compensation.

Sue

And actually, you might not get compensation because the developer might agree to do the defects or might agree to scrap the contracts. And you don’t actually get any compensation. So you end up having to pay them out of your funds, really.

Jimmy

Yeah. So I don’t think that can work. I mean, what you can do, though, there is under the tribunal rulings, the NCAT rulings, there are a limited number of situations under which NCAT will award costs.

People think if you win a case at NCAT, you get costs. You don’t. One of those circumstances is if the other side knew that there was little chance of them winning, and they’ve just gone ahead for whatever reason, you know, just to hope that you would give up, then the tribunal can say, well, you knew you weren’t going to win this case.

So we’re going to award costs against you. So that’s a situation where I think, and this is where fair trading really lets everybody in strata down. You contact fair trading and say, what are my chances of winning this?

And they say, well, we can’t tell you because that’s the tribunal. And that comes under the attorney general’s office. And you go to the attorney general’s office and say, what are our chances of winning this case?

And they say, oh, that’s strata, you better talk to fair trading.

Sue

And you just need a clear line of communication.

Jimmy

And there should be a branch somewhere between fair trading and the tribunal where you put your case to them and they say to both parties, we think there is a more than 50% chance of this going one way or the other. Now, let’s say you’ve gone to them with a case about contracts or defects and this middle ground has said, we think developers are going to lose this. The developers then know that if they keep pursuing it, they’re going to end up with costs against them because the tribunal can say, hang on, these experts have looked at this and told you you were going to lose, probably.

Why did you pursue the case? We’re giving costs against you. And that’s what’s missing, clear directives on so many things in strata that would be so easy to resolve if somebody would just sit down and go, you know what, let’s look after the apartment owners.

Sue

Absolutely. And they’ve kind of got to realise that they’re the most important people in the equation because you’ve got a housing crisis. If people aren’t willing to buy apartments, then developers won’t build them.

Jimmy

Exactly. And the answer is not to build shoddy apartments.

Sue

Yeah, sure.

Jimmy

All right. And talking about the housing crisis, how would you feel if you were over 50 and you had to share an apartment just like you did when you were a student? That’s after this.

And we’re back. Now, Sue, did you know that one third of women over the age of 65 live on their own?

Sue

No, I’m surprised it’s so many.

Jimmy

And it’s partly because of divorce and partly because women live longer than men. So, you know, there they are, they’re stuck in a house or an apartment on their own, having to meet all the costs themselves. And nobody on the horizon who’s going to come and assist in this way until they’re ready to go into some sort of retirement home.

So some people on the over 50s are saying, well, house sharing works.

Sue

So they’re advertising some rooms in their apartment to come and share with them.

Jimmy

Apparently this makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Well, does it? What would put you off sharing an apartment with people who might be friends, but they might be complete strangers?

Sue

There’s so much room for conflict, isn’t there, really?

Jimmy

Oh, totally.

Sue

I remember sharing apartments, you know, when I was younger as a student. And there always used to be fights over whose milk was whose in the fridge. And there used to be loads of terrible things at the back of the fridge that nobody said was theirs.

And there’d be a terrible smell that would go through the apartment until somebody cleaned it out. And kind of rosters for housework and those kind of things. And I remember once I was sharing and it was two other women, and it seemed great until one of them got this boyfriend who came over constantly.

And suddenly, I was sharing with three people instead of two. And although we had a ban on smoking in the apartment, he used to hang out the window and smoke. And the smoke used to just drift back in anyway.

So it was just awful, actually. So you kind of think 50-year-olds, would they be better flatmates? And they might be.

They might be. They could be, couldn’t they?

Jimmy

A bit more mature.

Sue

Yeah.

Jimmy

They would have realised by the time you reach 50 that you have to compromise sometimes.

Sue

Yeah. But maybe they’ve been living on their own for a while as well. And they’ve become a bit selfish and self-obsessed and set in their own ways.

Jimmy

But whenever we have discussed the idea of downsizing, the one thing that always stops us doing it is if we downsize, we’d go to a one bedroom apartment, it would only have one bathroom.

Sue

Oh, no, we can’t share a bathroom anymore. Isn’t that funny? That’s only in the last 50 years, really, isn’t it?

I mean, I think we’ve talked about this before. Growing up in a family of five, we had one tiny bathroom. There was never any problem.

But now two of us, we need two bathrooms.

Jimmy

Well, I mean, it’s like when we go and visit family who survived perfectly well for years and years with one bathroom for the family, and we go and visit them. And it’s like panic stations for me. I want to see where the bathroom roster is.

Sue

I did a story the other day about a six bedroom house with eight bathrooms. Oh, my God, why would you need eight bathrooms for six bedrooms?

Jimmy

That’s a really good question. Well, I can imagine some big houses have a downstairs toilet for guests.

Sue

Yeah, which is fine, but that’s seven.

Jimmy

And then those big houses also have a bathroom out the back for people who work in the garden or people who are working in the house.

Sue

No.

Jimmy

Yeah. Really? Yeah.

Sue

Wow.

Jimmy

This is a big house. It’s eight bedrooms. You’re talking about some sort of mansion, right?

Sue

Six bedrooms.

Jimmy

Six bedrooms.

Sue

Yeah.

Jimmy

Eight bathrooms.

Sue

Would they have servants? Oh, my God.

Jimmy

No, but they might have workers. They might have gardeners and cleaners. I bet they do have both of those things.

Sue

Wouldn’t they be able to use the downstairs toilet or just pee in the rose bushes or something?

Jimmy

I don’t know. Well, I think it’s the danger of them peeing in the rose bushes that means they have to have a bathroom out the back for them to use.

Sue

But we’ve become a much more clean-o-phobic society.

Jimmy

Clean-o-phobic. Germophobes like President Trump claims he is.

Sue

Oh, God.

Jimmy

Yeah. So what else would put you off? So there’s the food thing.

Sue

I guess when people go to bed different times.

Jimmy

Oh, that’s true.

Sue

I mean, even us, you’re a night owl, you stay awake late at night and I get up early in the morning and we often disturb each other.

Jimmy

Yeah.

Sue

When you’ve got more people.

Jimmy

Getting up at different times. I heard somebody on a podcast the other day, I think they were on James Valentine the other week and they were talking about how they’d gone camping and the guy next to them had only two chairs and a table and an awning and they decided that, you know, to move their caravan at five o’clock in the morning or at least prepare to move. So they’re sleeping in a tent and this person is winding up their awning and then winding it down again and putting stuff in a box and taking it out again and they only had to fold up.

So they fold up the chair and then they unfold them and they’re just… Now, put that in an apartment and somebody gets up in the morning and puts the radio on because they want to hear the news or they get up and they, you know, over 50, every chance you’ll still be working. So they get up and have a shower before they go out or…

Sue

Yeah, I talked to a guy at the gym the other day and he’s just split up with his boyfriend.

Jimmy

Yeah.

Sue

And he was saying because he gets up at 4am every morning to go to the gym and his boyfriend just couldn’t stand it anymore because…

Jimmy

I can’t blame him.

Sue

He would be woken up.

Jimmy

Yeah.

Sue

Yeah. I mean, how does he go to the gym at 4am?

Jimmy

Also, I remember the labelers in the flat shares that you’ve had in the past, you know, the people who label everything.

Sue

Yep.

Jimmy

You know, this is my coffee, please don’t drink it or this is my coffee, please don’t use a wet spoon.

Sue

That would have been your notice.

Jimmy

Yeah, I hate the wet spoon. Yeah. I would probably have been a labeler had I spent long enough in shared apartments.

I would have been saying this is my cheese. Don’t touch my cheese, which is almost guaranteed to get your cheese stolen.

Sue

It sounds like a self-help book. You know, that thing about…

Jimmy

Oh, yeah. Who moved my cheese?

Sue

Yes. Yeah. So it would be very quite difficult for people, really, but it makes financial sense.

Jimmy

It does. And companionship.

Sue

Companionship. Absolutely. Because people can be very lonely living alone.

Jimmy

Yeah. I think the idea of, well, you know, the one third of women over 60 living on their own. Well, with a house full of 60, like three 60-year-old women living together, would that be, that could be fun for them.

Sue

Yeah, absolutely.

Jimmy

I mean, the only problem would be, you know, the fights over are we going to watch Vera or Call the Midwife?

Sue

Jimmy! Ridiculous. I don’t know any 60, well, actually I do know 60-year-olds who watch those shows.

Jimmy

Yeah, those shows are designed for women of that maturity.

Sue

Ah, men too.

Jimmy

Really?

Sue

I don’t know.

Jimmy

Yeah, yeah, see, there you go. Look, there’s a lot of TV shows that men watch that are designed for women, primarily. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the new home for Flat Chat that’s after this.

Flat Chat has been going for an awfully long time.

Sue

How long?

Jimmy

I reckon it must be at least 15 years, maybe getting on for 20.

Sue

Wow. We should find out so we can have a party.

Jimmy

We started out on Domain in the Sydney Morning Herald. I remember we’d written a book called Apartment Living and the Domain editor called you up and said, would you write a weekly column about apartment living? And you couldn’t because you were contracted to Women’s Weekly.

Sue

That’s right, I was doing stuff for them.

Jimmy

Yeah, so you know, that would have broken your contract. So you said, look, my co-writer, he’ll do anything for a buck. He’ll do it for you.

So we started writing, I started writing the column. And I remember thinking there were so many problems that we had discovered in Strata. And I thought, what?

I’ve got about three weeks, four weeks, I think, of writing about these problems before all the advertisers in Domain go, hang on, this guy is writing about developers and we’re paying for this through advertising. So I went for it. I thought, I’ve got three, four weeks, really went for it.

And then they reviewed the readership and discovered it was the second most read section of the paper. Great. Or Domain.

The first, the most popular being title beads, which was a very popular part of Domain. So I was there for years and years and years. And then Airbnb went to the editors and said that I was campaigning against them.

And they said something, they said that I had written 322 articles about Airbnb and how awful it was. And I was an activist, not a journalist. And the editors said, no, no, no, no, it’s fine.

He’s entitled to his opinion. And then, who’s that Fair Trading Minister? Matt Keane.

Matt Keane stood up in Parliament and said, Jimmy Thompson is the best journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. And I knew at that moment I was screwed.

Sue

Your days were numbered.

Jimmy

Yeah, because I quite clearly wasn’t. There were a lot better journalists than me. And yeah, sure enough, within a couple of weeks, they’d said, oh, we’re going to drop the column.

And I had a meeting at the Fairfax building with the deputy editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. And they said, we’re not going to let you have a regular column, but we will do stuff occasionally when it suits. And they didn’t know that five minutes after I met them, I was meeting a section editor from the Finn Review who said, yeah, come and work for us.

So I did that for a long, I think about seven years. But the problem was, it was in the investors section and I had to gear all my stuff towards investors. So I was missing a big chunk of the audience.

So last month, I called them up and said, look, it’s not really working for me. And it’s not really working for you. And they agreed, you know, it was their section has certainly become even more focused on investors.

That’s what it’s called. It’s called smart investor. So we bid each other farewell.

But I spoke to a colleague, the same guy who started Flat Chat in Domain now works for news.com.au. And this week, we start a whole new audience, I think, of people who read the Daily Telegraph and read it online.

Sue

The Herald Sun.

Jimmy

And the Herald Sun. Well, it’s mainly New South Wales. We’re focusing on New South Wales because the laws are all different in different states.

And so as of this week, I think I will now be on the news.com.au website.

Sue

As well as flatchat.com.au. And the Flat Chat website. So hopefully the audience will stick with you, the current audience.

Jimmy

Well, first of all, they’ve got to find me or the audience, the current audience will stick with me because Flat Chat, the website is not going to change.

Sue

Yeah, of course.

Jimmy

Because, you know, we pretty well established what we do. And but we have what I think is a new audience that is not used to reading about Strata. And they don’t know what they can and can’t do in Strata.

And they might hopefully it will connect with them.

Sue

Great. Well, congratulations, Jimmy.

Jimmy

Thank you very much. So, yeah, we’ll see how we go. I mean, it’s an experiment to begin with.

Neither of us know exactly how it’s going to go. But if it takes off anything like the way it did in Domain all those years ago, then it should be fun.

Sue

Fantastic. Well, good luck.

Jimmy

Okay. Right. That’s us for another week.

Sue

Thank you very much for listening to us. And we’ll talk next week.

Jimmy

Thanks. Bye.

Sue

Bye.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.