Reply To: Victoria: A shambolic state of strata chaos

StopfordKid wrote:

why don’t all of the unhappy/aggrieved lot owners group together, call a special general meeting, replace the committee then proceed to replace the OC managers

If only it were so easy.  I can’t say if this is the case in this instance but, going by multiple experiences elsewhere, and not just in Victoria, if you have a tight cabal of owners running the strata committee, aided and abetted by complicit strata managers, they will do whatever it takes to prevent non-resident owners from finding out what’s going on, including refusing to hand over email addresses (usually on spurious “privacy” grounds) to people who want to change things.

This is exacerbated in Victorian buildings that have a higher-than-average number of short-term holiday lets in a mix of rentals (which tend to be more than 50 percent of the lots, in any case).

The investor owners don’t know what’s happening and therefore don’t care.  The committee cabal controls the messages going out – “everything’s fine except for a few ratbag residents trying to stir things up” – and the investor owners simply don’t get involved.

If there are rental agents in the mix, the investors are even less likely to know what’s happening and the threshold for calling an extraordinary general meeting can never be reached.

This might sound like a paranoid conspiracy theory but, trust me, it’s happening right now in strata schemes across Australia.  It’s just that we are seeing the effects – neglect, bad management and deteriorating buildings – vividly illustrated in Victoria.

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