Strata facts (and fun) to the fore at conference

Tickets are running out for the inaugural Strata Impact Conference on the Gold Coast at the very beginning of next month, your chance to see and hear a stack of strata experts, PLUS yours truly, in the flesh.

Organiser Dr Nicole Johnson of Strata Knowledge promises this will be an event with a big difference in the strata sphere, not least because it won’t be just a gab-fest with strata businesses spruiking their services.

And there will be some familiar and trusted voices bringing their knowledge and experience to what Nicole intends will become a reservoir of accessible knowledge for everyone in strata.

For example, our good friend Amanda Farmer from yourstrataproperty.com will be hosting a heavyweight panel of strata lawyers in one of the major events of the two-day conference.

Dr Cathy Sherry – who may well be the only academic specifically teaching strata law – will be there to talk about what strata actually means in a property ownership sense.

Professor Hazel Easthope from the UNSW City Futures will be there to talk about Sustainable Living in Australian apartments.      

Organisational psychologist Rob Newman will talk about disruptive personalities in strata committee meetings, and how to deal with them.

Meanwhile Nicole Johnson herself will present on fire risks in apartment buildings … including the much-discussed issue of Li-Ion batteries.

Dr Rupa Ganguli will show how project marketers – basically high-octane real estate agents – are inadvertently shaping our cities. Dr Tim Law will show us how defects that lead to dangerous mould are dealt with (or not) by developers and builders via their four forms of denial and deflection.

On a related topic, Associate Professor Sarah Green from RMIT will talk about designing healthy apartments, while building management expert Bruce Mackenzie will look at building defects.

Bringing us up to date with the latest technical innovations, Stephen Thornton and Brendan Jakubenko of Voltin Systems, will introduce how four forms of techonology – Artificial Intelligence, Infra-red, virtual reality and augmented reality – can be combined to provide cost-efficient building inspections.

Getting back to those strata lawyers, Amanda Farmer will be wrangling a review of how strata law works (or doesn’t) in different states with a panel that includes Tim Graham, Victoria-based President of the Australian College of Strata Lawyers, Susan Proctor from the ACT, Jessica Cannon from Queensland, Mark Atkinson from WA and Alison Benson from NSW.

Suffice it to say you’d be happy to have any of these people on your side in a strata legal stoush.

And there are other familiar names on a fun session on risk management where an insurance expert (Paul Keating) a body corporate manager (Nicole Wilde) and a strata lawyer (Michael Kleinschmidt) are confronted by hypothetical strata challenges and have to work out how they would deal with them.

Nicole Johnson says this conference will be informative and fun – which is where I come it. I (JimmyT) have been invited to MC the event so I will make sure we have a few laughs along the way.

The conference is on August 1 and 2 at the fabulous Langham hotel on the Gold Coast. You can find out more and register for the few remaining passes at on this link. Registrations close on July 19 so you have just over a week to sign up.