@Kangaroo said:
It may be (is) the OC’s legal responsibility to get it replaced, but it’s the current owner’s responsibility to pay for it. If he/she can get it back from a tenant, then that’s up to them.
Sorry, Roo, but you are wrong, regardless of how stupid you think it is. Common property is the responsibility of the Owners Corp. The owners corp has allowed a situation to develop where common property have been removed and they have done nothing about it.
How could they have known? Well, regular fire safety checks would have picked it up but even so, ignorance of what is happening in their building is no excuse. That’s why every time a unit in a building is put up for sale or rent, it’s well worth someone from the EC having a sticky beak to make sure all is hunky dory.
By the way, this principle came to my attention in a case where an owner had replaced the sliding doors on his balcony with fancy folding timber ones – something that could only have been spotted by someone taking a boat out to sea at Bondi Beach and training high-powered binoculars on the building. Nevertheless, years after the unit was sold and the doors (inevitably) failed, the new owner was able to argue successfully that the new doors were still OC responsibility and they had to pay for the much more expensive repairs.
And where did the principle of “Caveat OC” come from? The same place that says you can’t blame a new owner for a problem caused by a previous one. The buck has to stop somewhere and that place is the OC. If the OC can’t be bothered to check on their own property, they they can’t complain when it goes walkies.