FLAT CHAT WRAP

The fire earlier this month (February 2019) on the outside of the Neo200 building in Melbourne conveniently coincided with a meeting of state and federal government ministers at which it was announced that the highly dangerous product would be banned from our shores.Of course, this is way too late for the people who have bought apartments in buildings that are covered in the potentially deadly material. You might as well set fire to the stable door - the horse has bolted.Although they are approaching this in very different ways in different states, the end result for apartment owners like you or me, is that we have to identify the stuff then - unless we are very lucky - pay to have it removed.Now, there may be cases where the buildings are still under warranty and the developers haven't disappeared up their own flammable phoenixes, and then you just have to pay lawyers to persuade the developers to get it removed.  Good luck with that.Now, I can hear a chorus of voices saying: "Tough luck!  Nobody told you to go and live in apartments. In fact, we told you it was a bad idea.  So don't expect us, the taxpayers, to pay for your stupidity."Hmmm.  Imagine if we applied that to bushfires. "Hey, we didn't tell you to go and live in the middle of forests full of trees that nature has designed to burn ferociously.  So don't expect us to pay for the back-burning that might just prevent you from losing your home (or even worse) next bush-fire season."Of course, we don't say that because we believe in collective responsibility.  We'll contribute to your back-burning if you contribute to our freeways.So why doesn't that apply to flammable cladding?  The people who are responsible, if they get half a chance, are walking off whistling their "nothing to do with me" tunes.Politicians have overseen lax and laissez-faire controls on  builders and developers for decades.  And as for the aforementioned high-rise high rollers ... well, we are all reaping the dubious reward of allowing unscrupulous people to do unspeakable things in pursuit of profits.  In fact, it doesn't need to be all that blatantly corrupt.  Cut a few corners here and there and it's money in the bank.Meanwhile 85 percent of new blocks report defects and the average rectification bill is, according to experts, over 20 per cent of the cost of the building (so much for NSW's 2 per cent defects bond).So now we find ourselves in a phase of punish-the-victims policies. Whether or not we live in blocks covered with cladding, or crumbling like the Opal Tower, we deserve better.All of which I didn't say when I was invited on to Weekend Sunrise a couple of weeks ago to talk about cladding. Click in the pic below to watch the item. (Note to self - next time iron shirt.) https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Weekend-Sunrise-JIMMYT-on-CLADDING.mp4

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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.

Talking off-the-plan purchases and defects - plus your calls - with James Valentine.  And why Sydney MP Alex Greenwich thinks Airbnb is bad for Sydney renters, and Mark Latham will be bad for the NSW parliament.

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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.

Chatting with James Valentine on air the other day, I was suddenly aware of how immune (or is it inured?) one can become to the idiocies of strata living.James posed the perfectly reasonable question; if you can take a kettle or a car back to the seller if it proves to be faulty, how come you can't just hand back the keys to an off-the-plan apartment when it turns out not to be up to scratch?"The walls are cracking.  Here's the keys and I'll have my deposit back too, thank-you very much."It's crazy when you think about it; you spend 20 or 30 times as much as you would on a car, buying an apartment, but the consumer protections are less than if you'd bought a dodgy toaster.Even with the protections that exist, the chances are that you are going to have to hire lawyers at great expense to get things fixed - and that's if the developer is still around. And there's no guarantee of success.The government should be taking a look at the whole scandalous system right now, when property sales are in a downturn and apartment starts are back to almost zero.  Nothing like a bit of consumer confidence to boost business.You can listen to the whole session, including listeners' questions, on the podcast below.  And you can log in to James' own podcasts HERE.The second part of our podcast this week sees Alex Greenwich MP talking about homelessness - partly informed by his stint on SBS's Filthy Rich and Homeless documentary series.Insightful as ever, Alex points out that homelessness is growing in Sydney at twice the rate of the rest of the country and suggests the goverment should be building more affordable housing than spending money to "keep people in the cracks" by funding only crisis accommodation.And finally, he takes a huge swing at Mark Latham and other extremists who are angling for a seat in the NSW Senate.  When one of politics' genuine nice guys sticks the boot in, you sit up and pay attention.That's all in this week's Flat Chat Wrap podcast:https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-Wrap-13-Alex-James-.mp3

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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.

Talking apartments, Airbnb, pets, the Opal, defects, cladding and all things apartment related with Sydney MP Alex Greenwich

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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 our podcast is given over to an extended chat with NSW Independent MP for Sydney, Alex Greenwich.I've come across many politicians in this game. Most have been honest and decent (to a point) and a few have been self-interested and not so much corrupt as corrupted - mainly by party allegiance and personal ambition.But it's very rare to come across someone who is as clear-sighted, committed and empathic as Alex.Locally, he's known as the man who took over from Clover Moore when she was forced to chose between being Mayor of Sydney and the city's MP in the NSW parliament.That he won the by-election comfortably was no surprise but he then increased his majority at the next state election, despite having a chunk of traditionally Liberal voters grafted on to his constituency.Nationally, he was the face of the same-sex marriage campaign while appearing on the SBS TV series Filthy Rich and Homeless. And as soon as the next state election campaign is done and dusted, he will take up cudgels for the voluntary euthanasia movement.Will all that on his plate, as well as being an active constituency MP, we were very lucky to get an hour of his time to talk about the things that matter to us here at Flat Chat.Why him?  Becasue his constituency has more high-rise apartments than any other in Australia. So this podcast is the first of two parts in which we discuss the strata issues of the day - Airbnb, cladding, defects  ... and pets.The highlight of the chat, for me, was his description of how a last-minute push by the Owners Corporation Network (and a few like-minded souls) alerted MPs in constituencies with large numbers of apartment blocks that they were about to be effectively handed over to Airbnb and other online letting agencies to be used for holiday lets, regardless of the devastating effects of strata communities.His description of the corridors of Parliament full of MPs asking each other what was going on and the last minute U-Turn by our Planning and Better Regulation Ministers makes our latest Flat Chat Wrap podcast worth a listen in itself.Enjoy.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-Wrap-11-Alex-1-.mp3

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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.

JimmyT gets up at 4am to talk to ABC Radio presenter Rod Quinn (and other insomniacs) about strata living in Australia.

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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.

JimmyT gets up at 4am to talk to ABC Radio presenter Rod Quinn (and other insomniacs) about strata living in Australia.

In this week's podcast we have kind of hijacked the Rod Quinn "Talking Points" segment for his ABC Overnight show on radio last week - featuring Flat Chat's very own JimmyT talking strata with people from all over Australia,In may ways, this is a podcast within a podcast, in that we have grabbed the segment with Jimmy in it and slotted it into our format, but you will still hear all the ABC titles and credits so there's no mistaking that this is Rod's show.Oh, and did we mention that Jimmy got up at 4 am to do this?What did they talk about at that ungodly hour?  Opal cracks, flammable cladding, over-development and certification - all the usual stuff.But then ABC listeners called in and asked questions like, what can you do when Uber drivers insist on leaving your communal garage door open.  It seems these part-time cabbies share a flat with a dozen others. There are so many potential breaches - even in Darwin - you barely know where to start.And that's just for starters.  It's a long podcast so put your feet up and enjoy.Oh, and if you want to hear more from Rod, you'll find his podcasts here: https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/overnights/episodes/Meanwhile, here's the Flat Chat Wrap, Ep11https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-Wrap-Episode-11.mp3 

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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.

Every so often, I get invited on to a radio or TV show to talk about apartments.  This week I've been on Breakfast on ABC 702 with Josh Zepps, (usually hosted by Robbie Buck and Wendy Harmer) and then on Friday I got up at 4am to go on ABC's early morning show with Rod Quinn (which will be featured in next week's podcast).That was a challenge (apart from being two cups of coffee under par)  because we had lots of callers from all over Australia. Next week, I will be on Triple-M in Adelaide to talk about Airbnb.Back to this podcast, I was on the ABC with Josh to discuss why residents of the Opal Tower had been told to move back into their apartments, whether or not they felt safe.  It's an emotive issue and we tend to forget that the driving principle behind why developers are in business is to make money, not necessarily house families. They were paying hotel accommodation for people who could have moved back home - so they pulled the plug.We also discussed the damage done to owners' investments that aren't covered by defects claims - the plummeting values of apartments that are no longer worth what some people have borrowed in mortgages.It would be nice at this point to say we moved on to lighter fare, but it doesn't get much darker than the legal battle to get defects fixed in Part Two of our Strata Disaster podcast.Sue Williams and I recall what happened when our owners corporation had freed itself from the dodgy developer's management and committee cronies, only to be led by so-called "experts" into a $6 million battle with attack-dog lawyers.And all the time, the strata committee was being undermined by disgruntled neighbours, overly secretive lawyers, liars and spies and then, finally, subjected to the most horrendous personal abuse.  Fifteen years on, we can laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but there are people in the building who still haven't uttered a word to each other since those days.Pour yourself a stiff drink and plug in to the podcast.https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-wrap-10.mp3

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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.

I am occasionally asked how come I ever got into writing about apartment living.  After all, I'm a published author,  have been a reasonabIy successful TV scriptwriter and occasionally still turn my hand to travel writing.  Against any and all of those pursuits, writing about flats and by-laws, committees and Airbnb breaches might seem a little ... um ... prosaic.It's not, by the way - far from it.  The French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote that everything he knew about life he learned from the football field (he played in goal for Algeria). Well, much of what I know about people has come from observing the way we behave when we are obliged to live together, under the same roof, sharing many of the same facilities, adapting (or not) to each other's quirks and foibles.It all began 20 years ago when my partner Sue Williams and I bought an apartment off the plan, encountering dodgy developers, corrupt building managers and incompetent strata managers, all ring-mastered by a shady chairman. Luckily for us, this convocation of bullies and boneheads made a fatal mistake early on ... they decided arbitrarily to ban pets when many purchasers had bought in on the basis that it was a pet-friendly building.That simple misstep brought together people who might not otherwise have even spoken to each other and who, in their campaign to block the pet ban, began unpicking the the connections between the developers, their in-house managers and their cronies on the committee .Apart from liberating the building from the clutches of a bunch of less than honest players, it led to the book Apartment Living (written by Sue and me), which led to a long-running weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald and now Financial Review. That column was called Flat Chat ... and here we still are.It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.  Enjoy the podcast.JimmyT https://episodes.castos.com/flatchatpod/Flat-Chat-Wrap-9.2.mp3

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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.