› Flat Chat Strata Forum › From the Front Page › Victoria: A shambolic state of strata chaos › Current Page
Painting a picture of entire jurisdictions based on anecdotes about individual buildings isn’t particularly useful. They can be useful if the context and framework that led to the failure is known, and highlighted.
This is a hugely relevant point. Years ago I did a story about one major and highly regarded developer who was demanding proxy votes from owners as a condition of purchase of their units.
They then used their proxies to run the scheme exactly as they wanted, including sacking the entire committee of a block that objected to the “private” marina outside their building being turned into a commercial enterprise. The new committee wrote to the local council and planning department saying the block was now fully in favour of the development.
When the story was published, then planning minister Frank Sartor changed the law to prevent contractual demands for proxies (soon after taken up by Victoria), citing community unease and media reports. That would have been me because no one else was writing about strata back then.
More recently, we exposed a developer who had deliberately delayed the finish to an apartment block so that he could rescind the contracts under a sunset clause. The purchasers could either get their deposits back or pay another couple of hundred thousand to secure the purchase (it was a very hot market at the time).
The then (and now again) Fair Trading minister Victor Dominello changed the law overnight to make it so that the developer had to get approval from the Supreme Court if they wanted to invoke the sunset clause. The developer tried it that way and was sent a way with a flea in his ear.
In both cases, the stories were about single instances but they illustrated a larger or wider problem. Random anecdotes are often just little local difficulties, but when a number of them expose the same flaws in the system, they are worth telling and re-telling until someone pays attention.