Strata law reforms pushed back another six months

Strata law reforms in NSW are to be delayed, yet again, with changes now not due to come into force until July next year.

The plan to reform the state’s 50-year-old strata laws was first flagged in 2011 but a series of ministerial changes have hampered the process.

As revealed previously by Flat Chat, the appointment of the fourth Fair Trading Minister in just over a year has led to a rethink of the proposed reforms that were originally due to come into force in July last year (2014).

The best guess now is that they will not now be enacted until July 2016, fully two years later than promised. The reforms had more recently been slated to come into force in January 2016.

However, new Fair Trading Minister Victor Dominello has been holding a series of “off the record” meetings with significant stakeholders in the strata industry to outline his commitment pushing through strata reforms – but probably not in their current form.

Representatives of strata managers (SCA-NSW), the Real Estate Institute, strata owners (Owners Corporation Network) and developers (Urban Taskforce and Property Council of Australia) have either already met the minister privately or are expected to do so.

The message coming out of those meetings is that the Minister is determined to promote strata law reforms … but not before yet another round of consultation in the coming months.

The current strata law reform proposals were the result of one of the lengthiest and most comprehensive public consultations NSW has ever seen but were stalled despite what seemed to be a general consensus in their favour.

One industry insider said the Minister is “very upbeat” about the changes and is “determined to push them through.”

Controversial issues, such as the ability of 75 percent of owners to force the remainder to agree to the collective sale of their apartment block will remain on the books, however, with Mr Dominello convinced he has enough support in the upper house.

Other relatively oddball ideas, such as allowing council parking inspectors to patrol strata parking garages, may not see the light of day, if only because they require changes to other legislation as well as the agreement of all the different local councils.

Mr Dominello purportedly told strata community representatives that he lives in a strata scheme which has encountered defects problems “so he feels our pain,” one observer told Domain.

NSW is not alone in wrestling with issue of strata law reform.  Queensland also has a discussion paper out for submissions.  Their proposals, like NSW’s, include changes to the “collective sale” regulations and plans to allow parking officers to patrol strata car parks, as well as permitting bodies corporate to tow illegally parked cars.

And WA and the Northern Territory are both jumping on the collective sales bandwagon.  IN WA, which is well behind the rest of Australia in its strata and community laws, new regulations will mean a stepped threshold depending on the age of the building.

Although not quite reaching NSW’s generous 75 percent vote for forcing neighbours to sell their apartments, current proposals under discussion mean WA strata owners will require 95 percent for a scheme older than 15 years but less than 20 years old, 90 percent for a scheme older than 20 but less than 30 and 80 per cent for a scheme more than 30 years old.  Proposed strata reforms in NT also favour a staggered threshold for collective sales.

Victoria’s last shake-up of Owners Corporation legislation was last October while South Australia revamped its strata laws a year earlier in 2013.