Up to five more Mascots facing possible disaster
There could be as many as five apartment blocks in NSW teetering on the brink of forced evacuation – as befell the Mascot and Opal Towers four years ago –…
Opal
Heavy hitters line up for Strata Matters seminar
Efforts to curb dodgy developers and their farcical phoenixing frauds have been the focus of a lot of media coverage of late, but what does it all mean? Are the…
Building regs come back to bite gov in new Opal claim
The government’s new regulations on building defects may have come back to bite them on the bum, with owners of apartments in the infamous Opal Tower in Sydney suing the…
PODCAST 52 – Our strata year of living dangerously
It’s getting to the end of the year so we thought we’d look back at the last 12 months of apartment living in Australia. Unfortunately, there seem to be a…
Opal chair reveals his year of dealing with disaster
It’s the kind of bad dream that has strata chairs waking up in a cold sweat; being thrust into the heart of a very public building disaster, with residents thrown…
Building expert: defects plan is deeply flawed
The NSW government’s plans to construct our apartment buildings better in the future, released last week, were met with a universal outpouring of … well … whatever the opposite of…
Why Opal owners are really suing the state government
News that residents of the Opal Towers are planning to sue the State Government over its alleged failure to guarantee the building standards of their crumbling apartment block may be…
Time we had a Tripadvisor for unit block builders?
With defects on the minds of everyone in the apartment world, there’s a whole lot of finger pointing going on. Developers are saying engineers should be certified, strata owners say…
Forensic research – your best hope for not buying a high-rise lemon
With state planning ministers meeting this month, informed in part by a behind-closed-doors meeting of development “stakeholders” in NSW last week, you can be sure that building defects in their…
Boycott: Is it time we had an off-the-plan ban?
The advice from Owners Corporation Network spokesman Stephen Goddard could not have been more blunt: Don’t buy apartments off the plan. His actual words in an opinion piece in the…
Opal Tower owners don’t know how lucky they are
The owners of apartments in the now notorious Opal Tower probably don’t realise it, but they are lucky. Obviously, it was bad luck that supporting walls in their building in…
Flat Chat Wrap #12 – The ups and downs of apartment living with Sydney MP Alex Greenwich
Talking apartments, Airbnb, pets, the Opal, defects, cladding and all things apartment related with Sydney MP Alex Greenwich