FLAT CHAT WRAP

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 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 gets on 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 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 out 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.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.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-33-Commercial-share.mp3And it’s also available on YouTube.OTHER 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.

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 developers should be certified, and some people say anyone thinking of buying an apartment should be certified (but not in the same way).But it makes you wonder, when everything in our lives has some kind of rating, why don’t the people behind the biggest single purchases most of us will ever make have to compete for consumer credibility?You decide to go on holiday and before you’ve even checked the price of flights, you are scouring Tripadvisor to see how other travellers rate the hotels where you’re thinking of staying.You need a new kettle and you go to internet comparison sites looking for the fastest, quietest or funkiest appliances which, after all, are only required to boil water.Whitegoods have star ratings based on their energy usage (or lack thereof). Restaurants, airlines, consumer goods, cars, credit cards and insurance – they all get some sort of rating. So why not apartment blocks, developers and builders?Don't miss our podcast on this - Click HereOkay, for a start, would they accept the opinions of non-industry assessors?  And if not, how valuable would their self-assessment be?To answer to that, we should look at what star ratings do for that other essential – food.A few years ago the food industry effectively hijacked the consumer advice system intended to indicate the relative health values of foods.That would explain why a certain breakfast cereal, which would rate just over one star on a sensible system, currently gets four stars out of five.That’s also why packaging confusingly reveals what percentage of your estimated daily calorie intake a portion of the food represents, rather than clearly telling you how many calories, fat and sugar it contains.What does this have to do with apartment blocks?  If history is anything to go by, our state governments will develop amnesia about how we got into this mess –developers hiring their choice of certifiers who approved their substandard buildings – and let the industry set its own rules.Expect to hear shameless equivocation as the pollies explain how the people best placed to fix the problem are those who caused it.Okay, yes, there are plenty of good, honest developers who’d rather chew concrete than knowingly build substandard homes.But where have they been for the past 20 years while confidence in their industry has been eroded by cowboys and chancers? Talk about a conspiracy of silence!So here’s a plan for proper consumer protections: a star ratings system.  We start by wiping the slate clean, with every developer and builder getting three silver stars.However, every time they fail to rectify defects, and they lose in court or at a tribunal, they also lose a star.And every year that they survive without a significant legal challenge over defects, they gain one, graduating from silver to gold as their reputation for excellence and integrity is enhanced.Eventually, you will have a seven-tier star rating that ranges from no stars to three gold stars, which will become as valuable to developers and builders – and consumers – as chefs hats are to restaurants.I hear whispers that the Owners Corporation Network – the peak body for apartment owners – is considering introducing some kind of Choice-like ratings system.They’d better move fast before the industry’s own star scheme is wheeled in, carrying all the integrity, credibility and social value of a reality TV dating show.A version of this column first appeared in the Australian Financial Review.

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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.

In this week's Podcast, Jimmy Thomson and Sue Williams discuss why it is that we can get ratings and comparisons for just about everything we buy ... except the largest purchase most of us will ever make.  And they float the idea of people being given (and losing) a licence to live in strata.We have a friend called Royce who wouldn’t buy so much as a toothbrush without checking online to see if it was the best design (at the best price) for his specific dental needs. He is so notorious for his exhaustive product checking that our group of friends refers to the process as “Roycing”.For instance, you say you’re thinking of buying a particular brand of new TV and someone says “Oh, have you Royced it?”We were reminded about that this week, after my piece in last weekend’s Australian Financial Review about how to avoid buying an apartment with built-in problems, when we realised there is no independent ratings system for apartment blocks, builders or developers.So in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap, journalist and author Sue Williams and I ask why it is that you can go online and get people’s opinions of hotels and resorts on websites like Tripadvisor (and others), but you can’t get any unbiased, independent reviews of developers, builders and even apartment blocks.That segued into our chat about how a star rating might work.  We think you could start with everyone getting three stars, which they could lose by poor service and bad behaviour, and gain by just providing a decent service. We’re not talking about losing points for having a building with defects – it’s more about how they deal with the defects once they have been discovered.If a developer compels their apartment owners to take them to court, and then they lose the case, that’s a silver star gone immediately.On the other hand, if they have a good record of dealing with owners’ issues, in a timely and reasonable fashion, those silver stars turn gold.  Could it work? Yes, but, to be honest, we are more likely to have some half-cocked voluntary code of conduct foisted on us.But all that chat about bad actors on the developer and builder side, got us talking about a similar system for strata residents. We came up with the idea of a licence to live in strata, which everyone got for free as soon as they signed up to rent or buy, but then lost points – and eventually the ability to live in strata completely – if they turned out to be antisocial pains in the ass.Moving on, Sue told us about the giant loophole in strata law that means you can get orders issued by NCAT but then they don’t have the power to enforce them if the subject of the order just ignores themWe also talked about who pays the power bills when residents put their own washing machines and dryers in common property laundries.And we discussed residents who own more cars than parking spots, who permanently use visitor parking as atheir own. Should you crack down on them, even when there’s plenty of visitor parking to spare?Or is it, to use that phrase beloved of lawyers around the world, “a matter of principle”?That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-32-Ratings.mp3And it’s also available on YouTube.OTHER LINKSJimmy 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.

We have a friend called Royce who wouldn’t buy so much as a toothbrush without checking online to see if it was the best design (at the best price) for his specific dental needs. He is so notorious for his exhaustive product checking that our group of friends refers to the process as “Roycing”.For instance, you say you’re thinking of buying a particular brand of new TV and someone says “Oh, have you Royced it?”We were reminded about that this week, after my piece in last weekend’s Australian Financial Review about how to avoid buying an apartment with built-in problems, when we realised there is no independent ratings system for apartment blocks, builders or developers.So in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap, journalist and author Sue Williams and I ask why it is that you can go online and get people’s opinions of hotels and resorts on websites like Tripadvisor (and others), but you can’t get any unbiased, independent reviews of developers, builders and even apartment blocks.That segued into our chat about how a star rating might work.  We think you could start with everyone getting three stars, which they could lose by poor service and bad behaviour, and gain by just providing a decent service.We’re not talking about losing points for having a building with defects – it’s more about how they deal with the defects once they have been discovered.If a developer compels their apartment owners to take them to court, and then they lose the case, that’s a silver star gone immediately.On the other hand, if they have a good record of dealing with owners’ issues, in a timely and reasonable fashion, those silver stars turn gold.Could it work? Yes, but, to be honest, we are more likely to have some half-cocked voluntary code of conduct foisted on us.  You can read more on this HERE.But all that chat about bad actors on the developer and builder side, got us talking about a similar system for strata residents.We came up with the idea of a licence to live in strata, which everyone got for free as soon as they signed up to rent or buy, but then lost points – and eventually the ability to live in strata completely – if they turned out to be antisocial pains in the ass.Moving on, Sue told us about the giant loophole in strata law that means you can get orders issued by NCAT but then they don’t have the power to enforce them if the subject of the order just ignores themWe also talked about who pays the power bills when residents put their own washing machines and dryers in common property laundries.And we discussed residents who own more cars than parking spots, who permanently use visitor parking as atheir own. Should you crack down on them, even when there’s plenty of visitor parking to spare?Or is it, to use that phrase beloved of lawyers around the world, “a matter of principle”?That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-32-Ratings.mp3And it’s also available on YouTube.OTHER LINKSJimmy 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.

In this week’s episode of the Flat Chat Wrap we look at the revelation that the Opal and Mascot towers “disasters” are just the tip of a very large apartment block defects  iceberg.Jimmy Thomson and Sue Williams have been writing about apartment block defects – and other, happier apartment-related issues – for more than 15 years.In this episode of the Flat Chat Wrap, Sue recalls the time more than a decade ago that a feature on defects almost cost her job, when a property writer with a close personal relationship with a developer, saw her expose on apartment block defects and called her friend.The developer called the editor and threatened to pull all their advertising if the story went ahead. The editor caved in.  Sue offered her resignation but it was turned down (although she is now a freelance working mostly for other publications).That’s just part of the reason that the whole grubby business of building defects, government lack of interest (to the point almost of collusion) and corporate cover-ups have led to the point we are at now where ordinary people don’t know for sure whether or not their apartment is going to have serious building problems at some point.This episode looks at two of the root causes of the problem – phoenixing and lack of “duty of care” and how they can, together, leave apartment owners with little or no consumer protection.Phoenixing is when a development company builds an apartment block and then goes into liquidation when the claims for defect rectification come in. However, a similar company with similar or identical directors can then rise from the ashes of the previous entity and do the same thing over and over again.“Duty of care” or the lack of it relates to a legal precedent established last year that said builders only have a responsibility to apartment block developers, not to the people who bought the apartments.One of the legal arguments was that they couldn’t have contract responsibility to the apartment owners through their owners’ corporation (body corporate) since that body didn’t exist when the contracts were signed.So you can see, remove the developer (who has gone into voluntary liquidation), and the apartment owner is left high and dry.NSW is planning to create the position of Building Commissioner to deal with these and other problems, including the certification of engineers and developers. We’ll be watching with interest to see how that pans out.On a happier note, Sue has also been looking at the winners of the NSW Architecture Awards and some of the innovative designs that caught the judges’ eyes.LINKS:SMH feature on defectsSue Williams on Architecture awardsFlat Chat WebsiteJimmy Thomson’s websiteSue Williams website Jimmy’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.

In this week’s episode of the Flat Chat Wrap we look at the claims that the Opal and Mascot towers “disasters” are just the tip of a very large apartment block defects iceberg.This comes as no surprise to JimmyT and Sue Williams, who have been writing about apartment block defects – and other, happier apartment-related issues – for almost two decades, meeting a response that ranged from complete lack of interest to virtual censorship.In this episode of the Flat Chat Wrap, Sue recalls the time 15 years ago that a hard news feature on defects almost cost her job, when a (then) property writer saw her newspaper expose on apartment block defects and called a developer mate to warn him.The developer called the editor and threatened to pull all the company's advertising if the story went ahead. The editor caved in.  Sue offered her resignation but it was turned down (she is now a freelance writer and author, mostly working for another publication).That’s just part of the reason that the whole grubby business of building defects, government lack of interest (to the point almost of collusion) and corporate cover-ups have led to the situation we are in now where ordinary people live with the fear that their apartment is going to have serious building problems at some point.This podcast looks at two of the root causes of the problem – phoenixing and lack of “duty of care” and how they can, together, leave apartment owners with little or no consumer protection.Phoenixing is when a development company builds an apartment block and then goes into liquidation when the claims for defect rectification come in (if not before). However, a similar company with similar or identical directors can then rise from the ashes of the previous entity and do the same thing over and over again.“Duty of care” or the lack of it relates to a legal precedent established last year that said builders only have a responsibility to apartment block developers, not to the people who bought the apartments.One of the legal arguments was that they couldn’t have contract responsibility to the apartment owners through their owners’ corporation (body corporate) since that body didn’t exist when the contracts were signed.So you can see, remove the developer (who has gone into voluntary liquidation), and the apartment owner is left high and dry.NSW is planning to create the position of Building Commissioner to deal with these and other problems, including the certification of engineers and developers. We’ll be watching with interest to see how that pans out.On a happier note, Sue has also been looking at the winners of the NSW Architecture Awards and some of the innovative designs that caught the judges’ eyes. That's all in theis week's Flat Chat Wrap:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-31-Tip-of-the-iceberg.mp3And on Youtube HERE:OTHER LINKS:SMH feature on defectsSue Williams on Architecture awardsJimmy Thomson’s websiteSue Williams website Jimmy’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.

Jimmy Thomson investigates four different kinds of insurance (including Airbnb) and why telling one little white lie about whether or not you were allowed to have short-term letting in your apartment could invalidate your cover.He's joined by Steve Tchepak, Acting Head of Underwriting at our sponsors CHU Insurance.

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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.

One of the big questions around the recent Mascot Tower problems was why didn't the building insurance kick in, rather than the state government having to bail the owners corporation out with emergency funding.The simple answer is that it looked very much like a building defect and that's not covered by ordinary strata insurance. So what is strata insurance -  the compulsory one that covers the building and the common property, and is paid for by the Owners Corporation - and what does it cover?There are a lot of questions and more than a few surprising answers around strata insurance. Did you know that strata insurance also covers the fixtures and fitings in your apartment? Do you know what those fixtures and fittings are? Did you know that you can apply for a payout from strata insurance yourself, even if your strata committee or strata manager refuses to pass on the claim? Do you know what landlord insurance is, and what it covers? Why is it that if you go directly to the strata insurer (rather than a strata manager or broker) you don't get a discount equivalent to their commission? Does changing a garage into a habitable room change the building insurance? Can you get Airbnb insurance for your flat? What would you need to do to have your insurance invalidated? (Clue: it would have to be something really bad or dishonest).All these questions and more are answered by our guest in this week's podcast, Steve Tchepak from our sponsors CHU Insurance. Enjoy.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-30-Insurance.mp3And the podcast is also available on Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuceKMkp8Y

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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.

Confronted by images of residents of Mascot Tower evacuating the building, the NSW government has moved relatively swiftlly to plug the accommodation gap with a loan to the Owners Corporation to cover the cost of emergency billets for the owners and renters.As JimmyT and Sue Williams discuss in this week's podcast, the state government's loan may never have to be paid back, because they think they know what (and who) caused the structural damage and it's eminently possible it wasn't building defects.And even if it does turn out to be defects - and the block is well out of warranties - the loan may never have to be paid back "at the government's discretion."Meanwhile we ask, if you can find money to rehouse evacuees (quite rightly), what about all the people facing massive bills to remediate flammable cladding which is only on buildings, risking life and limb, because of the slack attitudes of a procession of governments in this state.You're happy to take our stamp duty - how about offering us some protections?  That's all in this week's podcast ... and more.

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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 in the Podcast we look at the Mascot Tower story and the apparently generous offer by Fair Trading to bankroll emergency accommodation for residents.They are saying it’s a one-off, as they must.  If NSW Fair Trading let it be known that they were in the market for payouts to help people with building defects, the queues of the duped and dudded would be longer than the lines for the new iPhone.The interesting aspect of all this is that Fair Trading are saying that the Mascot Tower may be crumbling but there is every chance that it isn’t defective - it just wasn't designed to have its foundations undermined.With engineers claiming it is literally sinking, they may have a point. Experts are already looking closely at a building site next door.Another theory gaining a lot of ground is that other developments in the area haven’t taken into account the relatively high water table – the level of water beneath the surface of the ground – and that has, literally, undermined the foundations of the Mascot.To put this another way, the Mascot Tower could have been perfectly adequate and built to code, but then other building work in the area changed the environment in a way with which it was not designed to cope.Another theory is that all new buildings in the area were designed to allow for this but some of them weren’t built to their approved design, and that has had a knock-on effect.Whatever the reason, it could well be that the residents of the Mascot will not have to pay the expected millions of dollars required to fix their block, because the authorities have other builders and developers in their sights.But there is another aspect to this.  Stories are already doing the rounds that nobody trusts - or should trust - apartment buildings.  That is bad news for Better Regulation Minister Kevin Anderson.  He says there's a crisis of confidence in the apartment duilding industry, which is palpably true.  He can only hope that there's not a crisis of construction.All of this and lot more – including what this means (if anything) to buildings with flammable cladding – are discussed in this week’s podcast.Now, don’t get too excited, but our Flat Chat podcast listens quietly sneaked past the 10,000 mark last weekend.How significant is that? I don’t know but any figure with four zeroes gets my attention. So Yaaaay for us!OK, enough of the wild celebration, you can listen to the latest podcast here …https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-29-Mascot-loans.mp3And now it’s on Youtube, too:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73XqF4w4AoIf 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 Castbox (our favourite Podcatcher).  And please leave us a rating ... especially if you like the podcasts.

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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.