FLAT CHAT WRAP

This week the Flat Chat Wrap podcast is all about conflict and various forms of resolution … including revolution.First Sue Williams and I take a look at we take a look at mediation and what it actually means. In NSW and Queensland, mediation is an obligatory precursor to asking for an adjudication at your state tribunal.In Victoria it kind of is too, but isn’t really.  It’s called conciliation there, and is more of a recommended option than an obligation. How much it harms your case if you don’t even try to resolve it, is hard to say – depends on who is hearing your case at the tribunal, probably.For many people involved in disputes, it’s just a box to be ticked off before you put on the boxing gloves and get in the ring for the real fight.Others turn up, fired up with righteous indignation, clutching a sheaf of by-laws and print-outs from the Flat Chat Forum, only to discover the mediator is more life coach and less umpire than they would like.In short, unless the respondent in your case is prepared to concede defeat, perhaps because they can sense failure and humiliation at the Tribunal, you are either going to have to cede some ground yourself, or gird your loins for phase two of the fight.And it has to be said that I many cases the other side of the argument doesn’t even show up.  Why? Because they don’t have to.Moving on, we discuss how to get rid of a “despotic, neurotic and psychotic” chair of an apartment block – and again it’s different in all the states.In NSW you have to pass a special resolution at general meeting to remove any or all of the owners from a committee.  However, the committee can replace any office-bearer just by voting another of their number into the role.It’s similar in Victoria but in Queensland the general meeting chooses the office-bearers even before they elect the committee.  That means only a general meeting can sack an officer of the body corporate.Oh, and there’s a couple of quirky rules that don’t exist anywhere else that can get you kicked off a committee in Queensland.And finally, introduced by a song from Groucho Marx, Sue meets architect Daniel Meszaros who has collected a whole bunch of crazy objections neighbours put up to prevent developments and turned them into cartoons that you can see HERE.You can listen to the podcast right here:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/flat-chat-38-conflicts.mp3If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes on your phone, tablet or computer as soon as they are posted (it’s completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating – it helps people to find us. 

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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’s a real mixed bag in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast – finance, Airbnb and sneaky sex.Sue Williams and I start our dissection of the week’s strata news by looking at the suggestion that people suffering under building defects might get low-interest or even no-interest loans from the government.We reckon it’s better than nothing but it’s not enough.  Anyone who has ever suffered through the agonies of realising you have defects in your building, then having to fight your developer to get them fixed - if you can even find them before they phoenix into a puff of smoke – and then face raising the cash because the only people legally obliged to fix defects, regardless of who’s to blame for them, are the apartment owners.We reckon, apart from the developers and builders,  the people who have contributed most to the problem and benefitted most from it, are our successive governments, Labour and Liberal, who have become addicted to the revenue from building booms to the point where they have sold apartment owners down the river.So come on. Forget all this loans nonsense and compensate us for all the grief you’ve either caused or enabled.   There’s more on this HERE.Next cab off the rank is the government’s discussion paper on Airbnb-style holiday lets.As you will read in my Australian Financial Review column this weekend (posted here a couple of days later, Stayz has welcomed one of the proposals while Airbnb is decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.There’s a mandatory code of conduct and an industry-managed registry of holiday lets (why does that fill me with a sense of cynical dread?) plus extraordinarily strict fire regulations which we think with do more to curb short-term holiday lets than the other two combined. Again, there’s also more on that HERE.And finally, Sue brings a tale of what happened when a friend spotted a couple having sex in the complex’s communal spa pool.  Think that sound a bit weird, wait till you hear who they were!And to think Airbnb routinely fights holiday let registers on the grounds of privacy! It’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating - it helps people to find us.OTHER LINKS:You can read all the material around the holiday letting discussion paper, and make a submission, starting HERE.And you can read Jimmy AFR piece online HERE (if you have a subscription).  It will be in print and then on this website at the weekend.Jimmy Thomson’s websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columnsSue Williams Website

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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’s a real mixed bag in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast – finance, Airbnb and sneaky sex.Sue Williams and I start our dissection of the week’s strata news by looking at the suggestion that people suffering under building defects might get low-interest or even no-interest loans from the government.We reckon it’s better than nothing but it’s not enough.  Anyone who has ever suffered through the agonies of realising you have defects in your building, then having to fight your developer to get them fixed - if you can even find them before they phoenix into a puff of smoke – and then face raising the cash because the only people legally obliged to fix defects, regardless of who’s to blame for them, are the apartment owners.We reckon, apart from the developers and builders,  the people who have contributed most to the problem and benefitted most from it, are our successive governments, Labour and Liberal, who have become addicted to the revenue from building booms to the point where they have sold apartment owners down the river.So come on. Forget all this loans nonsense and compensate us for all the grief you’ve either caused or enabled.   There’s more on this HERE.Next cab off the rank is the government’s discussion paper on Airbnb-style holiday lets.As you will read in my Australian Financial Review column this weekend (posted here a couple of days later, Stayz has welcomed one of the proposals while Airbnb is decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.There’s a mandatory code of conduct and an industry-managed registry of holiday lets (why does that fill me with a sense of cynical dread?) plus extraordinarily strict fire regulations which we think with do more to curb short-term holiday lets than the other two combined. Again, there’s also more on that HERE.And finally, Sue brings a tale of what happened when a friend spotted a couple having sex in the complex’s communal spa pool.  Think that sound a bit weird, wait till you hear who they were!And to think Airbnb routinely fights holiday let registers on the grounds of privacy! It’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.You can listen to the podcast right here:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-37-STHL-regulations.mp3If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating - it helps people to find us.OTHER LINKS:You can read all the material around the holiday letting discussion paper, and make a submission, starting HERE.And you can read Jimmy AFR piece online HERE (if you have a subscription).  It will be in print and then on this website at the weekend.Jimmy Thomson’s websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columnsSue Williams Website

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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 would be fair to say that Flat Chat’s approach to apartment living and strata law over the years has been robustly non-academic.  We use often cite anonymous sources and unverified reports to build a picture of all that is wrong with strata living (and many things that are right).Academic researchers, by contrast, meticulously record numerous interviews, often with clearly identified and authoritative subjects, referencing other studies and reports, to reach carefully considered conclusions.One such diligent researcher is Dr Hazel Easthope of UNSW who joined us this week for the Flat Chat Wrap podcast to discuss her new book The Politics and Practices of Apartment Living which has just been published by Edgar Elgar in the UK.In the podcast we discuss why she wrote the book – basically to get a handle on all this rapidly evolving lifestyle and its challenges, and how people are coping with it in different countries – and why she wrote it the way she did.The book is structured, she says, to follow the entire life cycle of an apartment block, from the planning stage to the eventual extinction of the strata scheme for renewal or even demolition.What she discovered was that, even though different parts of the world have different strata systems, everyone has basically the same issues – defects, lack of communication within the blocks and with their committees and managers, selfish residents and lack of understanding of rights and responsibilities.One universal issue was the lack of concern for and communication with tenants, who are routinely locked out of information, decision-making and community activities.This, of course, is hugely ironic since renters make up more than half the residents of  apartment blocks and are basically financing half the investment in strata homes (along with, in Australia, the subsidies provided by taxpayers via negative gearing).Hazel Easthope highlighted efforts in community building in Vancouver, with “street parties” and volunteer concierges, but she also talked about the problem of hijacked buildings in South Africa.There, in the “white flight” that followed the end of apartheid, luxury apartments in the posher parts of Johannesburg were abandoned by their owners, taken over by squatters, allowed to deteriorate with power cut off, affecting lifts, lights, sewerage and water supplies, and then criminal gangs moved in to “manage” them.The city council is trying to recover the buildings for paying renters but the problem is that with the majority of strata owners long gone, mostly overseas, there is no one to sign off on the legally required documents.And finally, she tells a funny but alarming story about what happened when two different companies were contracted to complete vital work on the same building.All in all, it’s a fascinating discussion about a very interesting book.    

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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 would be fair to say that Flat Chat’s approach to apartment living and strata law over the years has been robustly non-academic.  We use often cite anonymous sources, anecdotal 'evidence' and unverified reports to build a picture of all that is wrong with strata living (and many things that are right).Academic researchers, by contrast, meticulously record numerous interviews, often with clearly identified and authoritative subjects, referencing other studies and reports, to reach carefully considered conclusions.One such diligent researcher is Dr Hazel Easthope of UNSW City Futures department, who joined us this week for the Flat Chat Wrap podcast to discuss her new book The Politics and Practices of Apartment Living which has just been published by Edgar Elgar in the UK.In the podcast we discuss why she wrote the book – basically to get a handle on all this rapidly evolving lifestyle and its challenges, and how people are coping with it in different countries – and why she wrote it the way she did.The book is structured, she says, to follow the entire life cycle of an apartment block, from the planning stage to the eventual extinction of the strata scheme for renewal or even demolition.What she discovered was that, even though different parts of the world have different strata systems, everyone has basically the same issues – defects, lack of communication within the blocks and with their committees and managers, selfish residents and lack of understanding of rights and responsibilities.One universal issue was the lack of concern for and communication with tenants, who are routinely locked out of information, decision-making and community activities.This, of course, is hugely ironic since renters make up more than half the residents of  apartment blocks and are basically financing half the investment in strata homes (along with, in Australia, the subsidies provided by taxpayers via negative gearing).Hazel Easthope highlighted efforts in community building in Vancouver, with “street parties” and volunteer concierges, but she also talked about the problem of hijacked buildings in South Africa.There, in the “white flight” that followed the end of apartheid, luxury apartments in one of the posher parts of Johannesburg were abandoned by their owners, taken over by squatters, allowed to deteriorate with power cut off, affecting lifts, lights, sewerage and water supplies, and then criminal gangs moved in to “manage” them.The city council is trying to recover the buildings for paying renters but the problem is that with the majority of strata owners long gone, mostly overseas, there is no one to sign off on the legally required documents.And finally, she tells a funny but alarming story about what happened when two different companies were contracted to complete vital work on the same building.All in all, it’s a fascinating discussion about a very interesting book and you can hear it right here:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-36-Easthope.mp3If you want to read Hazel Easthope's book in hardback,  you can have it for a bargain price of 45 UK pounds (that’s 35 per cent off) from Edward Elgar publishing by going to www.e-elgar.com. Once the book is in your basket, enter “EAST35” in the discount code box (after delivery details). You can also sample the contents of the book there. This offer ends on September 31.Alternatively, you can get an online copy considerably cheaper by clicking on one of the ebook options on that page (but beware that the GooglePay option is in US dollars).To subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating - it helps people to find us...

____________________________________________________


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.

If you live in apartments for long enough it’s almost impossible not to catch a glimpse into other people’s lives. Most of us look away, hoping that the same courtesy will be afforded to us by anyone inadvertently seeing more than they should.But sometimes curiosity gets the better of us and an innocent, accidental glance turns into a look that lingers longer that it ought.OK that's understandable , but then there’s out and out voyeurism, when someone spends way too much time spying on their neighbours.It’s the latter that forms the theme of Rear Window, a movie that television historian Andrew Mercado and I discuss in the second part of our podcast about fictional apartment blocks in TV and film.Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window turned 65 this month, its world premiere having been staged on August 4, 1954.  Having watched it (again) last weekend, I can say it still stands the test of time.Stewart plays a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair who amuses himself by watching the goings on in apartments across the alleyway, then becomes convinced he has witnessed a murder.The view, supposedly the back alley of a Greenwich Village, New York block, was actually a specially built set on Paramount studio’s movie lot in Hollywood. But if nothing else, the discussion brought home to me how your memory can play tricks on you.Firstly, I thought I’d never seen it before, but it all came back to me when I watched it again (on Foxtel, for $3.95).  Then, as I say on the podcast, I envisaged Stewart looking through a telescope.  In fact, it’s a camera with a telephoto lens.And finally, largely thanks to the publicity picture above, I was sure it was in in black and white but in was actually in glorious Technicolour (and well worth a look whether you’ve seen it before, or not).Andrew and I also talk about The Apartment (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine) which seems very odd in these days of “me too”, since it centres around an office worker who feels obliged to lend his apartment to his boss so he (the boss) can have an affair with his secretary.  See, back in the day, that’s what people thought apartments were for.Green Card, the movie directed by Peter Weir gets a mention which leads to a discussion about how some of the characters in TV sitcoms could afford to live in these huge apartments in New York.It’s a pretty wide-ranging chat and at least it lets us see another side to apartment living that isn’t under the cloud of defects and cladding.If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating - it helps people to find us.OTHER LINKS:You can also hear Andrew talking about television on his Mediaweek podcast HERE.Jimmy Thomson’s websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columns 

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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.

If you live in apartments for long enough, at some point you're bound to catch a glimpse into other people’s lives. Most of us look away, hoping that the same courtesy will be afforded to us by anyone inadvertently seeing more than they should.But sometimes curiosity gets the better of us and an innocent, accidental glance turns into a look that lingers longer that it ought.But then there’s out and out voyeurism, when someone spends way too much time spying on their neighbours.It’s the latter that forms the theme of Rear Window, a movie that television historian Andrew Mercado and I discuss in the second part of our podcast about fictional apartment blocks in TV and film.Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window turned 65 this month, its world premiere having been staged on August 4, 1954.  Having watched it (again) last weekend, I can say it still stands the test of time.Stewart plays a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair who amuses himself by watching the goings on in apartments across the alleyway, then becomes convinced he has witnessed a murder.The view, supposedly the back alley of a Greenwich Village, New York block, was actually a specially built set on Paramount studio’s movie lot in Hollywood. But if nothing else, the discussion brought home to me how your memory can play tricks on you.Firstly, I thought I’d never seen it before, but it all came back to me when I watched it again (on Foxtel, for $3.95).  Then, as I say on the podcast, I envisaged Stewart looking through a telescope.  In fact, it’s a camera with a telephoto lens.And finally, largely thanks to the publicity picture above, I was sure it was in in black and white but in was actually in glorious Technicolour (and well worth a look whether you’ve seen it before, or not).Andrew and I also talk about The Apartment (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine) which seems very odd in these days of “me too”, since it centres around an office worker who feels obliged to lend his apartment to his boss so he (the boss) can have an affair with his secretary.  See, back in the day, that’s what people thought apartments were for.Green Card, the movie directed by Peter Weir gets a mention which leads to a discussion about how some of the characters in TV sitcoms could afford to live in these huge apartments in New York.It’s a pretty wide-ranging chat and at least it lets us see another side to apartment living that isn’t under the cloud of defects and cladding.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-chat-35-Screen-2.mp3If you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subscribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify or wherever you download your podcasts.  And if you like our podcasts, please leave us a rating - it helps people to find us.OTHER LINKS:You can also hear Andrew talking about television on his Mediaweek podcast HERE.Jimmy Thomson’s websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columns 

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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 so much doom and gloom around strata at the moment you feel you’re missing out if your apartment block isn’t on fire, falling down or both.So we’ve decided to lighten the load in this week’s podcast with a look at TV shows that were set in apartment blocks, especially Australian shows.And for that, there is no better person to sit at the Flat Chat microphone than producer, critic, writer, broadcaster, media podcaster and now cinema owner Andrew Mercado.Andrew is a total Number 96 geek, not least because he produced the TV doco Number 96 … The Final Years. So, once we’ve heard about the joys of cinema ownership, that’s where we start our discussion.It turns out that Number 96 was intended to be a vertical version of the UK’s Coronation St, which was very popular when the series was first devised by David Sale for Network 10 in 1972.Television history will show that it went way beyond that in terms of its content, characters and shockingly liberal use of nudity (certainly for the time).We then move on to my own show, Breakers – didn’t you know JimmyT was writing TV dramas before he ever typed a word about strata? – and how that fell foul of different censorship laws in Australia and the UK.In Australia at the time, TV stations could show PG-rated stuff in the afternoons when kids were at school, but in the UK, it was general release stuff during the afternoons, which caused a problem with the BBC who had bought the series.This was an issue because we had the first gay teenager as a permanent character in a teen soap (as well as the first Aboriginal kid as a permanent role).For his efforts to push the envelope, Jimmy was exposed in his former newspaper in Scotland as “The man who wants to bring under-age gay sex to afternoon TV.”  Talk about fake news!Moving on, we chat about how the Secret Life of Us could have been shot in Sydney … and why it wasn’t.We look at Wonderland which Jimmy says was Breakers for grown-ups – partly because it was created by Sarah Walker, the senior writer on that show.Andrew reckons Wonderland was “too nice”, an opinion backed up by Sarah – who, by a weird coincidence, Jimmy bumped into the next day – who confirmed the network only wanted positive stories.Oh, and she denies it was Breakers for grown-ups; she says they were trying to make Sex and the City for Australia.And finally, we talk about The Heights, the serial drama set in a Housing Commission apartment block which, in their wisdom, the network commissioned as half-hours then decided to run in one-hour blocks complete with two sets of titles and credits.It’s still a very good show, Jimmy and Andrew agree, and they love the fact that you can binge on the whole series on iView.Having rambled on about TV for way too long, Andrew and Jimmy’s chat about the movies and American TV shows set in apartments will have to wait till next week.You can also hear Andrew talking about television and movies on his Mediaweek podcast HERE.OTHER LINKS:Jimmy Thomson’s websiteSue Williams websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columns

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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 so much doom and gloom around strata at the moment you feel you’re missing out if your apartment block isn’t on fire, falling down or both.So we’ve decided to lighten the load in this week’s podcast with a look at TV shows and movies that were set in apartment blocks, especially Australian shows.And for that, there is no better person to sit at the Flat Chat microphone than producer, critic, writer, broadcaster, media podcaster and now cinema owner Andrew Mercado.Andrew is a total Number 96 geek, not least because he produced the TV doco Number 96 … The Final Years. So, once we’ve heard about the joys of cinema ownership, that’s where we start our discussion.It turns out that Number 96 was intended to be a vertical version of the UK’s Coronation St, which was very popular when the series was first devised by David Sale for Network 10 in 1972.Television history will show that it went way beyond that in terms of its content, characters and shockingly liberal use of nudity (certainly for the time).We then move on to my own show, Breakers – didn’t you know JimmyT was writing TV dramas before he ever typed a word about strata? – and how that fell foul of different censorship laws in Australia and the UK.In Australia at the time, TV stations could show PG-rated stuff in the afternoons when kids were at school, but in the UK, it was general release stuff during the afternoons, which caused a problem with the BBC who had bought the series.This was an issue because we had the first gay teenager as a permanent character in a teen soap (as well as the first Aboriginal kid as a permanent role).For his efforts to push the envelope, Jimmy was exposed in his former newspaper in Scotland as “The man who wants to bring under-age gay sex to afternoon TV.”  Talk about fake news!Moving on, we chat about how the Secret Life of Us could have been shot in Sydney … and why it wasn’t.We look at Wonderland which Jimmy says was Breakers for grown-ups – partly because it was created by Sarah Walker, the senior writer on that show.Andrew reckons Wonderland was “too nice”, an opinion backed up by Sarah – who, by a weird coincidence, Jimmy bumped into the next day – who confirmed the network only wanted positive stories.Oh, and she denies it was Breakers for grown-ups; she says they were trying to make Sex and the City for Australia.And finally, we talk about The Heights, the serial drama set in a Housing Commission apartment block which, in their wisdom, the network commissioned as half-hours then decided to run in one-hour blocks complete with two sets of titles and credits.It’s still a very good show, Jimmy and Andrew agree, and they love the fact that you can binge on the whole series on iView.Having rambled on about TV for way too long, Andrew and Jimmy’s chat about the movies and American TV shows set in apartments will have to wait till next week.You can listen to the Flat Chat Wrap HERE:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-chat-34-Screen-1.mp3Or you can go here and listen on YoutubeIf you want to subscribe to the Flat Chat Wrap and get new episodes as soon as they are posted (it's completely free!), click on this link for iPHONE and IPAD and this one for Youtube. You can also subcribe on  Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher) or here on Spotify.  And  if you like the podcasts, please leave us a rating - every little helps people to find us.You can also hear Andrew talking about television on his Mediaweek podcast HERE.OTHER LINKS:Jimmy Thomson’s websiteSue Williams websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columns

____________________________________________________


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.

How would you feel if you suddenly had 50 to 100 strangers walking through your lobby every day, clogging up the lifts just when you are trying to get to work or when you come home?These are the fears raised by residents of two neighbouring buildings on Sydney’s North Shore (and discussed in our podcast) where the very loosely defined approval for commercial development inside a residential building means that, in one instance, what was intended to be a gym looks like it’s going to be an open plan office, while a similar fate awaits what was supposed to be half a dozen separate small business attracting very little foot traffic.You can read the whole story by following the link to Sue Willams story at the end but it got us talking about whether owners corporations (bodies corporate) have the right to decide what kind of businesses occupy the commercial spaces in their buildings – and should they have that right if they don’t?Also in the podcast, JimmyT hops into two of his hobby horses in one discussion when he chats about a phenomenon detected in Queensland where Airbnb is apparently undermining the viability of some on-site caretaker managers.Just to recap, the pre-sale of onsite management rights is something that Jimmy frequently describes as legalised corruption. Illegal everywhere else in Australia, it’s a grubby cash grab in the Queensland law that allows developers to sell the management rights to as-yet unbuilt apartment blocks.That means the eventual owners not only have no say in the terms and conditions of the contracts, which can be for 25 years, they are obliged to pay inflated levies to cover the cost of the purchase.However, recent changes in strata law in Queensland mean that owners are no longer obliged to go through the on-site caretakers when they want to rent their properties to holidaymakers.Enter Airbnb which not only takes a much lower cut of the rent, it allows the owners to rent their properties to whomever they want.  Now, Jimmy has been a long-standing critic of Airbnb commercial set-ups in residential buildings but this, he says, may be a rare case of two wrongs making a right.  In any case, holiday rentals have long been part of the strata scene in Queensland so it's not like they are turning purely residential blocks into hotels.And finally we have the sad case of a stolen pot plant, as reported in our Forum.  Sue, who tends to see the best in people has some interesting thoughts on how a residents’ cleaner could be seen taking a pot plant from common property and get away with it.Jimmy blames the cleaner’s employer.  How could that work?  For that you’ll need to listen to the podcast which is also available on YoutubeOTHER LINKSSue’s story on the commercial blocksJimmy Thomson’s websiteSue Williams websiteJimmy’s Australian Financial Review columns 

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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.