Minister takes a baseball bat to strata lawyers

Strata owners are indeed living the nightmare, Jimmy!  Brand new buildings that are neither safe nor waterproof.  Years of water running down loungeroom walls, bathrooms leaking water to the unit below, hazardous light installations, lifts that brake down constantly, lack of fire protection. The list of health and safety issues reported by our long-suffering members goes on … and on. 

Strata owners need to be heard.  Who out there in Flat-Chat world has lived in a defective building??  Tell us about it.  Lift your voice above the shonky builders baying for bigger profits.  And tell us about the good ones, who handed over a quality product.  They need to be held up as shining examples of what’s possible. 

Karen Stiles
Owners Corporation Network of Australia
http://www.ocn.org.au

@JimmyT said:

It looks like the Fair Trading Minister has swallowed the developer lobby BS about what is depressing apartment building in NSW.  Guess what – it’s not that some developers are putting up sub-standard buildings, it’s that Owners Corps are getting strata lawyers to force them to provide what they have been paid for.

Have a look at the Australian Financial Review’s story HERE and take a read of my response HERE.  Basically the developers say they are going Interstate because they don’t have legal problems there – yet NSW’s drop in apartment building of 5% over the past year is half the national average while the only states where building is increasing are WA (mining boom) and Queensland (migration).

The problem isn’t the legal action – it’s the appalling building standards of some fast buck developers that have eroded public confidence in their product.  Add in the GFC and the downturn in China and you realise the developers – opportunists by nature- are having a lend of the Mr Roberts whose MA in Commerce didn’t teach him that people will fight to protect their homes. Good developers are still building because buyers will go where they feel their money is well spent and they aren’t going to be ripped off.

We shouldn’t make assumptions but it seems the Minister is poised to remove the very last vestiges of consumer protection for new apartment buyers.  Last year he cut the defects period for non-structural defects (like roof seals, the most common complaint in strata) to two years.  So what now? You can’t pay your lawyers to fight their lawyers?

And here’s the nasty twist in the tail: when all is said and done and the dust has settled, only one group of people has a legally binding responsibility to maintain and repair common property and rectify defects – that’s us, the apartment owners.

If you want to make sure the Minister isn’t legislating to build the slums of the future, write to him at office@roberts.minister.nsw.gov.au or go to his website HERE where you will find all the contact details you need to let him know what it’s really like out here in Strataland – where we have to live with the mistakes he and his developer pals make.