Full garage but wants to park on CP

Depending on which state you are in the EC may or may not have the power to grant ‘minor uses’ of common property. 

In any case, I doubt that the owner with one car and one garage would have much luck arguing that he should be allowed to park on the common property just because he prefers to use his garage for another purpose.

That said, the person with one garage and two cars is lucky that the EC has accommodated them. It could be argued that they knew they would have only one reliable parking space before they got their second car or before they bought the unit. What if everyone with one garage space got a second car?

As it happens, our household has three cars and two parking spaces. Fortunately, one of our neighbours, who is a relative, also has two parking spaces but only one car and they are happy for us to use their second space.  Perhaps your person could arrange to rent or borrow or barter someone else’s garage. 

@lefty said:
Thanks, Jimmy, for your reply in your Xmas haze! I would be interested to hear if there is actual legislation dealing with use of a garage.  

OK, the legislation I found simply says that utility lots may not be used for occupation.

However, storage of goods in garages may have an impact on the lot owners home and contents insurance (they are probably not covered) and the strata insurance (they may be an additional hazard and obstruct fire safety installations like sprinklers).  If they cause strata insurance to be increased, you can charge the lot owner for the added premium. 

Most significantly, councils include parking allocations as part of their development applications in line with Roads and Maritime Services guidelines which take into account traffic flows to, from and around strata schemes and other developments. The general thrust of their guidelines is to get cars off the street and into the development, if at all possible.

So the issue here is whatever it says in your DA and if the garages are designated for cars, that’s what they must be used for or you risk having council inspectors coming round and ordering you to clear out the garage. This is the same principle that means you can’t re-allocate visitor parking to individual owners. You would be in breach of your DA.

So, in this case, if chummy gets bolshie and wants to exercise his “right” to park on common property, ask him if he has council permission for the change of use of the garage from how it is designated on the plan.  And point out that there may be insurance issues for him personally and for the owners corp.  That should put his gas on a peep.

By the way, the SC’s approval of the use of common property for extra parking complies with the RMS ambition to keep cars off the street but may breach its targets for the number of cars per dwelling.

Sometimes it becomes necessary and reasonable to be formal as per PS’s suggestion. Other times that can be overly bureaucratic. It would seem here that the informal approach has been working perfectly well and causing nobody any problem until this second person came along.

I would still say the key is that the first person’s use is reasonable, infrequent and not the cause of any complaint, so it was fine to carry on this way until the second person came along, and it might still be fine to continue this way. What person #2 wants is clearly different. It is not infrequent, occasional use; it is 100% of the time use. I would be just saying no to person #2 and preferring to stick with status quo for #1.

If #2 wants to make a fuss, then perhaps a solution would be to give everyone permission “to park one motor vehicle on the common property for a reasonable, low level of infrequent usage not exceeding an average of 2 days a month” (or some other formula that matches the actual low frequency of use by person #1). That would be fair and avoids an accusation of playing favourites. It would not subvert planning guidelines, or only very slightly. It would explicitly state the principle that residents should not expect to be able to use the common property for routine parking but it would recognise that it would be petty and pedantic to never allow it, not even for rare and unusual circumstances. At some time, nearly everyone needs to move their car out of the garage for some one-off or temporary unusual event – maybe having a fridge or couch delivered to there or while making a repair to the garage. This new by-law would allow person #1 to keep doing what they do within a limit that is agreed to cause little inconvenience to others but it would not allow people to turn their garages over to some other use while relying on the common property for parking.