Re: How to make a reasonable noise complaint?

Another update.

I made two complaints about noise to the Owners Corp. One complaint involved two apartments which held simultaneous parties on a Saturday night (mentioned above). The other was about more party noise from one of the same apartments.

The noise in both complaints was loud enough to wake us through double-glazing, the air conditioner running and trains passing.

In the process of making the complaints, the OC manager and our property manager instructed me *not* to approach the noisy tenants to try to resolve things in a neighbourly way but to let the OC handle the problem.

The OC cut and pasted my complaints into their correspondence with the tenants. The complaints were factual statements of the noise types, dates / times, origins and impact on us. In one complaint I also suggested the noise might be reduced if it were made inside, thinking this might be a way they could keep doing their thing without their noise being intrusive.

Initially both tenants acknowledged making noise to the OC and promised to follow the OC rules moving forward.

A notice to rectify breach was then issued to the tenant involved in both complaints.

Both apartments’ tenants wrote ‘formal responses’ about a week later denying that their noise would bother anyone and disagreeing in their own favour about the times they were making noise. They said they have the right to entertain (they do). They said they were not having parties, just friends over for dinner (Lady Penelope’s party definition would have been useful in the OC rules). They said we should have approached them about their noise in person because they are friendly, reasonable people. One also laid on several insults and threatened legal action against us if we complained again. How friendly and reasonable.

I’m surprised a simple matter has received an aggressive response—from two different tenants! Is this normal? Is it also normal to make a polite, factual complaint as part of a standard process; and then the resulting, quite personal hate mail be forwarded to us and all the other stakeholders by the OC?

Since both tenants now deny the noise, the OC has requested that we record any further incidents for its use as evidence. We have responded that the OC should check the legality of this request and suggested the tenants who might be recorded may need to know about it.

There has been no further unreasonable noise since the second complaint.

What now?