Oh, dear. Not another swipe at strata managers, please! Yes, OK, it’s a well-trodden path but, to be fair, the baddies have made themselves easy targets for the past few months.

As for the goodies, we’d say, as we often do, that they are in the majority. And how frustrating must it be to try to earn an honest buck and provide a good service to your customers, knowing that your rivals are getting ahead by playing fast and loose with the rules and regulations?

And it’s with that in mind that we venture into the strata naughty corner this week, to discuss two pieces of information, both of which we hope will encourage the many honest and decent strata managers to keep doing what they’re doing.

One topic is news that a well-known strata manager, who had been sacked several times but then promoted by NCAT into an all-powerful compulsory role, has now been struck off.

Yes, you read it right. On a total of six occasions, his contract was not renewed or he was even replaced with a statutory manager, but then appointed to exactly that role, taking over from the strata committee and owners corp in another strata scheme.

And we have unearthed the amazing, deep-dive parameters of the $300k investigation into Netstrata which looks like it’s going to leave no stone unturned.

Now, to be scrupulously fair, the independent inquiry could discover the whole problem was little more than a misunderstanding about who was paying how much to whom for what (“what” being insurance premiums and fees to contractors).

It’s as deep a dive into a company’s structure, business practises and culture as you will ever see, so we hope you’ll forgive us for spending a little longer in the naughty corner than usual.

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 mail@flatchat.com.au.
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 we look at NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler and how he’s ramping up his efforts to get his message across before he retires next month.

And that message is, basically, if you are buying off the plan right now and you don’t go with a developer who has an iCirt gold star rating, you’ve only got yourself to blame when it all goes pear-shaped.

We take a look at Sue's story about people buying property, not only with the help of Mum and Dad, but with investment from extended family and even friends through a kind of crowdfunding.

And we look at some real-life issues that occurred when family members based their deals on trust but then, years later, fell out. Ouch!

Finally we explore some quirky tales from the Flat Chat Forum, including strata managers who are trying to get round the three-year limit on contracts, the AGM election that never happened (so there is now no committee) and the strata management contract that says they get the frequent flyer points from payments by credit card.

All that and more 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 mail@flatchat.com.au.
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 bit of a catch-up in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap and a look to the immediate future, too.

We’ll be getting abreast of the news that NSW is planning to tighten regulations on strata managers in the state – a move that was announced a couple of weeks ago when Sue was off air.

What will this so-called crackdown mean? Will really bad strata managers lose their licences? Not very likely, we say, and for a number of valid reasons.

We’ll also be looking at a story that appeared this week in which “unelected bureaucrats and boffins” were accused of hampering the development of much-needed new apartments.

And in between we’ll be talking about a trend we are calling “luxureduction’ where low-cost homes for poor people are being threatened by luxury dwellings that will house a fraction of the number of people they displace.
Sue's alarming report on this growing trend is currently slated to appear in the Sydney Morning Herald this weekend.

Big issues, all three, and heaps of grist to our podcast mill.

____________________________________________________


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 mail@flatchat.com.au.
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.