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Topic
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Property in Melbourne.
I haven’t found many posts about theft from the carpark so I thought I’d try making a post and asking about it.
Recently we had our car broken into, all the tools stolen and that amounted to quite a large sum. We had asked for the CCTV footage to hand over to the police to assist them with tracking down the thieves however they said the cameras glitched on the day the burglary happened.
There are notices around the lift area saying the OC won’t take responsibility for any damages and losses in the carpark because they’ve constantly warned residents of thieves entering the building after residents, however the person who let the thieves in will be responsible. In this case, we can’t even identity if someone had let them in or not so does the responsibility fall back upon the OC? Also regarding security issues of not maintaining a working CCTV.
The person I’d been in contact with also kept reiterating that there is no building manager and only a committee full of volunteers and he’s already spent a lot of time replying to me, trying to get me to back off. However I after some research, I found out that the apartment is a tier 1 so we should have a building manager unless there’s a special resolution, so can I ask them to provide that?
The OC keeps pushing away all responsibilities and I’m trying to figure out what I can do here.Thanks!
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Replies
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The usual thing to do would be to claim on your own insurance.
You could try making a formal damages claim against the OC. To be successful you’d have to establish that the OC itself was in some way responsible for the theft or at least partly responsible. That’s not an easy thing to do when the area of the theft is a common one that has to accessible to all occupiers. Security in those areas is always going to be limited. I have seen a couple of successful cases however where the OC was aware that security had been compromised but failed to remedy the situation in a reasonable way/time-frame.
I’d agree that the strata must maintain the CCTV. But that doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to be functioning 100% of the time. Unsupervised CCTV systems are common in stratas and are designed to run automatically with minimal supervision and maintenance requirements. If the OC had known for some time that its CCTV was faulty but failed to get it repaired, it might be different. The OC is claiming however that it was a “glitch”.
You are correct that a Tier 1 OC in VIC must have a manager. But that’s a Strata Manager not a Building Manager. Building Managers are not part of the strata legislation.
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