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Assume some land is owned by a co-operative, and a member/shareholder pays to have a building put on it. Who then is the actual owner of the building? The member, or the co-op as a whole?
Jordan
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I would expect this would have to be covered by an owners corporation resolution to grant permission for the use of the common property subject to conditions.
We have a situation like this. The OC retains ownership of carports built over previously open, unallocated parking spaces. Unit owners were granted special privileges for exclusive use of the parking spaces for parking and limited storage with conditions that the unit owner is responsible to meet the OC’s costs for the initial construction and subsequent maintenance of the structure. The OC retains the right to carry out any of its functions on these bits of common property so long as it does not interfere unreasonably with the use of the spaces for parking vehicles. So, for example, even though the roofs were paid for by individual owners, we have a communally owned solar PV system on the roof in one area. In principle we could do other things such as collecting rain water for the common property garden or some other thing we have not yet thought of so long as it did not interfere with parking.
Assuming the land is owned by the co-op, say someone built something on that land without permission, then the co-op as a whole owns it.
It is not a very good idea to do that sort of thing.
I don’t know if Co-op differs from strata but generally: If the land is common property permission for exclusive use can only be granted according to the legislation (generally a special or unopposed resolution of a general meeting). The special privilege can only be revoked by the correct form of resolution also (generally a special resolution). It could then be granted to someone else. Certainly in the ACT it is not possible to sell the special privilege to someone else and thereby force the owners corporation as a whole to agree to the change of treatment of common property. That was part of a mistake our OC made 30 years ago (before my time
) and blew up in our faces about 2 years ago. Many years ago I was involved in putting up buildings and plant on leased property.
From an accounting viewpoint, we could not capitalise the buildings or plant as assets, they were immediately written off as an operating expense. So although we paid for the buildings, we could not “own” and had to leave them behind when the lease expired.
I imagine the same rules would apply in this case, unless there was some prior agreement with the co-op.
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