It is conceivable that a defect of the common property might affect only one or a few units. For example, at our set of townhouses, there were two carports whose walls on the unit boundary also served as retaining walls for the adjacent common property. Over the years, the soil level of the adjacent common property had been allowed to build up higher than the level the walls were designed to retain and the common property also lacked sub-soil drainage. Those two defects of the common property caused the walls to crack and bow inwards to the point of becoming unstable and risking the collapse of the units’ carport roofs. The OC recognised that the damage to private property had been caused by defects of the common property and we made the necessary repairs, paid by the OC. We checked other units. We did some precautionary work next to two units but none of the rest had this sort of problem.