A neighbour of ours pulled a real swifty on this.
He wanted to remove one bedroom and extend his lounge so that he could “have room to have bigger parties”.
In so doing his lounge room would now be above, below and adjacent to three neighbours’ bedrooms.
This is exactly the kind of thing that DAs are specified for – changing the configuration of the layout of the unit.
However, being prominent in the real estate industry, he had no trouble getting his builder to say that what he was doing was a “complying development” (requiring no DA).
Once council had accepted that, the owners corp went along with it, wrongly (but understandably) assuming that everything must have been OK or the council wouldn’t have accepted it.
To make matters worse, the estate agent is an a**hole – coming home at 12.30 am and cranking up the music to maximum volume – then gets very nasty if neighbours complain.
When I pointed out to the mostly useless City of Sydney Council planning department that they should have blocked this right from the start, they said “take it up with the builder who signed off on the complying development”.
Like that would do any good …