Schoolies are coming home … to your place!

Apartment owners, residents, committees and managers should be ready to crack down on unruly schoolies in apartment blocks, say strata advocates, as senior students celebrate their end of terms.

Apartments, especially those with swimming pools, near bars, beaches and cafes, are absolute magnets for young people, especially with no effective restrictions on short-term holiday letting anywhere in Australia.

And with the Gold Coast and Bali falling out of favour of late, the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) says NSW strata owners, their committees and managers should adopt a zero tolerance policy for unruly schoolies to avoid being left with damages bills of thousands of dollars.

The OCN, the peak body for strata owners and owners corporations, also says the resident  parents of unruly schoolies should be held accountable and made to pay for any damages.

It says schoolies have left a trail of destruction at previous years’ celebrations through apartment overcrowding and out-of-control partying.

“With the high cost of travel and the possibility of a new COVID variant on the horizon, we are expecting that many more schoolies will stay in NSW this year and not venture to traditional schoolies venues like the Gold Coast and Bali,” Karen Stiles, OCN Executive Director, said.

“Apartment overcrowding is a major problem during schoolies.  This often leads to apartments being turned into party houses with too much alcohol and drugs, fighting, vandalism and irresponsible behaviour.

“In the past, Owners Corporations have had problems with planking, drones, balcony hopping and damages to public areas like lifts and swimming pools, and it has been the owners who have been left to pay for the damages.

“Apartment owners and Owners Corporations are urged to provide the necessary paperwork and safeguards to ensure that, if there is a problem, the parents are held accountable for the actions of their children. 

“Owners Corporations need to ensure their security devices and in house CCTV are in good working order.

“Schoolies in the main are very responsible but, like everything else, the minority can tarnish this event.

“We want Owners Corporations to learn from previous years and to engage a zero tolerance policy with unruly schoolies so that owners do not end up paying.”

What you can do (the Flat Chat tactics)

• Provide party or Airbnb hosts with copies of relevant by-laws, highlighting rules on noise and behaviour on common property.
• Provide residents with the phone numbers of police whom they can call after 10pm on week nights and midnight on weekends to deal with noise.
• Remind residents that excessive noise is not allowed at any time of day or night in your block, regardless of “police” times.
• Advise residents to record bad behaviour on their mobile phones.
• Encourage immediate neighbours of party flats to get together to deal with issues as a group so that no resident is singled out and there are witnesses to what is said and done.
• Hammer the parents who allow or ignore their kids’ bad behaviour with by-law breach notices and censure notes in your committee minutes pour encouragez les autres in the future.