Are you being balked whenever you try to take advantage of some of the competitive offers from power companies?
It seems some developers and a few not very smart strata committees have been signing their schemes into electricity supply contracts that prevent individual owners – and even the whole building – from benefitting from alternative power prices.
Have you gone for a cheaper or greener supplier, only to be told your block is locked into a more expensive, less environmentally sustainable company and you can’t change?
Fair Trading is looking seriously at unfair power contracts and our friends at the Owners Corporation Network want to hear from people who’ve been dudded on their utility bills. That’s HERE.
One of our Flatchatters is ready to give up. She’s the chair on a committee of three in small apartment block and the other two members are a couple.
He rants and raves if he doesn’t get what he wants, his girlfriend invariably supports him.
Our reader has had enough and even though neither of the other two want to be chair, she’s ready to hand in her imaginary gavel and leave them to it.
What happens, she asks if, there’s no one to chair the meetings, write the letters, and all the many vital things that chairmen and women do?
But wait a minute! The other two are a couple? We have a simple solution that will put the balance of power back where it belongs. That’s HERE.
Another Flatchatter wants to know what to expect when she takes her dysfunctional committee to Fair Trading for mediation. Can she take a supporter? What will happen when she gets there?
Well, for a start, the other side might not even turn up. So is there any point in continuing if they don’t? That’s HERE.
Now that we know what the banks and financial managers have been up to, why would we assume strata managers would be immune from a little fiddle here and there.
Between secret bank accounts, discounted levies for mates, financials kept under wraps and committee members paying themselves handsomely for mismanaging the scheme, some Flatchatters think it’s time there was a Royal Commission into strata. That’s HERE.
You think we have it bad in NSW and Victoria? This tale from Queensland sounds tragically all too familiar.
The caretaker bullies the residential owners and bribes the absentee committee members with preferential treatment, overcharges for work that’s never done, lets the place run to rack and ruin and then starts hassling for an extension to their contract so they can sell it to someone else who can come in and screw the owners for even more money.
Said it before and we’ll say it again – it’s legalised corruption. That’s HERE.
There are lots more questions and a few answers on the Flat Chat Forum and there will be even more by the time you read this.
