FLAT CHAT WRAP

We wander down some well-trodden tracks in this week’s podcast, but there are a few twists and turns to keep you on your toes.

We dissect the arguments in a long missive from Airbnb about why it’s not their fault that there’s a housing crisis. 

The basic flaw in their argument – we need to build more homes (true) - is that building homes takes years but banning short-term lets could put more than 60,000 houses and apartments back on the market overnight.

We look at the benighted Aurora building in Melbourne and claims that non-English speaking owners didn’t know what they were voting for when they signed proxy forms.

And that segues into a discussion about how to get anyone to read anything to do with strata, ever.  As usual, we have a couple of cunning plans.

And we explore new laser goggles which will apparently let builders spot defects even faster than David Chandler. That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

There’s been a lot happening behind the scenes in Strataland over Easter.  For a start, there’s the latest astonishing figures on booming rent rises across Australia.  

Is it any surprise that the area with the lowest rent rises just happens to be the one with the only rent caps in the country? You awake, Chris Minns?

Speaking of whom, NSW has a new Fair Trading Minister, Anoulack Chanthivong, and with all respect to cultural differences, you have to wonder how long it will be before his name is distilled down to AnnaVong.

New Customer Services and Digital minister Jihad Dib has no such issues.  We take a look at the qualities these high achievers bring to their jobs.

We wonder what Australian Resident  Accommodation Managers Association (ARAMA) CEO Trevor Rawnsley has been putting in his tea. It’s one thing to think people in houses are more deserving than people in apartments, but to come out and say the former should be protected from Airbnb while the latter can cop what's coming to them is another thing altogether.

And finally we look at the house that collapsed in Condell Park, Sydney, and wonder if this will send shivers through the whole free-standing home industry. Those shivers can be very destructive.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

 Queensland held a round table about housing and homelessness recently as the Sunshine State faces a similar crisis to the rest of Australia when it comes to a shortage of housing – including apartments – and a lack of available rentals.
We pick the bones out of the proposal to limit rent rises to once a year and the dismissal of other radical reforms that were proposed.
You can read the ABC news report on the Queensland proposals HERE and the report on the original summit HERE.
Meanwhile, skipping lightly over the fact that we completely failed to predict who the next NSW Fair Trading Minister would be, Sue had some good news for apartment owners (and bad news for prospective buyers) in that it looks like the market may have bottomed out.
Is it time to “buy, buy, buy”? Or might you be saying bye-bye to your savings if you jump in too soon. Sue has some sound advice for prospective buyers and sellers in the podcast. 

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

Ah, the perils of trusting poll predictions immediately after an election.  While Labor have definitely won and Chris Minns is definitely the new Premier of NSW, the balance of power is still in doubt (at time of writing).

Does that mean that the Greens have regained considerable influence – something that we say in the podcast has slipped through their fingers? Apparently not.

A couple of independents have spiked their guns on that front.  In any case, the basic issues we take up in the podcast remain – rents, housing availability, short-term letting, embedded networks and dispute resolution.

By the way, if you are reading this in Victoria and Queensland, apologies for being Sydney-centric this week. But the truth is that whatever happens here often follows changes in Victoria – like the ban on no-cause rental terminations – or Queensland, like the curbs on proxy farming.

And, of course, ideas flow in the other direction too with proposed changes to Queensland’s rental laws having been trialled in other states.

Meanwhile, back in the pod, with John Ibrahim and James Packer both getting involved in apartment development in Sydney’s Potts Point, we indulge in a fantasy “who would you invite to dinner?”

What it might be like if those two larger-than-life characters sat down with Building Commissioner David Chandler, we muse? It would be entertaining, if nothing else, a claim we often make about our podcast.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

This week sees us return to familiar ground both geographically and in terms of our topic as we take a look at an SBS Dateline episode set in and around Edinburgh, Scotland.

Five years ago, Jimmy was in Edinburgh and was interviewed for the Scottish edition of the Times newspaper (see above), warning the city that it faced a rental crisis if it didn’t curb Airbnb and other short term letting agencies that were moving into residential apartments.

Now, rental availability has plummeted and rents have soared, and an SBS crew has visited Scotland which is about to impose among the toughest restrictions in the world on hosts who use the holiday letting internet platform and its ilk.
 You can read about how the rest of the world is dealing with airbnb compared to Australia's "light touch" in this article in The Conversation.

Closer to home, we look at why real estate agents think the ban on rent bidding has backfired.  And we come up with a solution to end it once and for all.

That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

It seems as if every time we look away from Victoria, some thing new and awful happens in that state’s strata system.

If it wasn’t the best buildings in Melbourne being handed over wholesale to Airbnb, with no meaningful restrictions, it was the cladding fires, then the cladding remediations revealing buildings that were rotting from the inside and now we have the Aurora shambles.

This week in the Flat Chat Wrap, we pick the bones out of the fiasco surrounding Melbourne’s third-highest apartment block and wonder what, if anything, the state government is going to do about its crumbling strata and tribunal system.

And on a brighter note, Sue has discovered a Melbourne-based initiative to recycle glass as fire-proof cladding. That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

This week’s podcast may have an international flavour – Jimmy is in Scotland and Sue in Sydney --  but it covers familiar territory.

First up we talk about a campaign to bring NSW’s rental laws into line with Victoria’s where landlords may not unreasonably refuse a request by a tenant to bring a pet into their property.

Given that both states now have strata laws that mean schemes can’t impose blanket bans on pets, could it mean an open-door policy for pets in apartments?

It will be interesting to see what compromises either of the major parties will come up with becaue they won't want to be left behind but they won't want to copy Victoria either (for reasons too dumb to explain).

Meanwhile we also discuss the first win in Building Commissioner David Chandler’s campaign to get insurers to offer guarantees for new-build high-rises.

And Jimmy discovers a novel plan to rescue Scottish apartments and house Ukrainian refugees, plus an Art Deco flat in Glasgow’s city centre for about $200k.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

We are all used to being told that we only own the air inside our apartments’ walls, although not the walls themselves, depending on which uniquely quirky set of strata laws you live under.

But how about owning the air above your apartment block?  Or even the apartment block next door?

What would you do with it?  Whay would you need it?  And what if the developer has already sold it to someone else.

Also this week we look at the NSW government’s crackdown on embedded networks – and we start by explaining what they are.

And then we find the building all over Australia that are defying rising energy prices by becoming so energy efficient that their apartments’ bills can be less than $10.

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

No sooner had we said last week that Queensland needed to look at their “collective sales” laws – allowing a super majority of owners to compel the minority to sell their units – than the state government there announced that’s exactly what they plan to do.

The precise process for this remains to be thrashed out in parliamentary committeesn, but you are dealing with a community that values – possibly over-values – property owners’ rights to do what they want with the home that they own (unless, of course, those rights have been sold off by the developer).

And there’s a reason this was known as “forced sales” when the idea was first mooted in NSW that 75 per cent of owners could over-ride the wishes of the other 25 per cent and sell off their building – especially one that was well past its use-by date and could be replaced by something that made more efficient use of the available space.

We also take a quick squiz at other body corporate law changes on the table, such as removing unreasonable bans on pets, curbing smoking on common property and allowing bodies corporate to tow vehicles that are blocking common property.

Later on, we discuss the announcement that the Victorian Building Authority is teaming up with the Australian Tax Office to identify phoenixing builders and prevent them from starting up again after they have shut down and walked away from their debts in previous projects.

And we’ll be looking at a massive much-rejected development project that just won’t go away and which we’ve called “Big Trouble in Little Bay”.

All that and more in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast.  

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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.

This week we offer you a podcast with all the bells and whistles – more accurately, it’s drums and gongs, as we take a brief detour to listen in on the community group that hilariously drowned out Sue’s latest talk on her books.

On more serious issues,  this week’s Podcast covers three contentious areas of apartment living and the first two concern apartment blocks that have been rendered uninhabitable – although for very different reasons.

First up, we look at a block in Queensland  which has suffered terminal damage from floods in the past few years  but owners can’t access funds available through a buy-back scheme because of archaic Body Corporate laws.

Then we look at the pre-NSW election political bidding war surrounding the Mascot Towers building in Sydney, in which Labor is offering to provide loans and guarantees to fix the apartments while the Liberals, slamming that plan, have launched an inquiry into what is needed to fix the block.

Are the two plans mutually exclusive?  We don’t think so.  In fact, we’re calling for a radical approach that would achieve the best possible fix in the shortest possible time. Or will it all be forgotten as soon as the last vote is counted?

And finally we plug into another pre-election sales pitch – this time to get strata residents easier access to electric vehicle charging … and why some apartment blocks just don’t want to know.

And Jimmy's environmentally responsible reason for not buying an electric car even though he really wants one. That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap. 

____________________________________________________


Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
Find us on Facebook  and Twitter and the Flat Chat website.
Send comments and questions to [email protected].
Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website.
Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.