How to get permission for a dog

Hi all,

Am hoping for some advice.  My partner and I bought our first apartment in October last year, part of the reason being that we really wanted to get a dog and knew we were unlikely to ever find a pet friendly rental.

When we bought, we checked the by-laws for this building, they are the default option A, i.e. you can keep a pet if you get permission, and permission can’t be withheld unreasonably.

I have a few questions:

1) Is it unusual that so far (6 months in) we have heard nothing official from the owners’ corporation about meetings and so on?  We have chatted to a neighbour or two but the best we can find out is ‘there’ll be an AGM around July sometime’.  How do we get involved?  We’d like to have a say in a few things around the building, but also obviously we are interested because we are thinking about the pet issue as well

2) Is it our best option to just write a letter to the owner’s corporation requesting permission to get a pet?  Many people have suggested we need to say what type of dog, it’s size, age, behaviour etc – given that we are asking permission to GET this dog, obviously we don’t have it yet, so do we just describe the dog we are hoping to get??

3) Given that the neighbour we spoke to told us that one of the executive committee is totally against dogs, and will likely refuse our request, where would that leave us?  Who is to say whether his refusal is ‘reasonable’?  Is this something we could fight, or would this be a final answer with no recourse?  Could we then take the issue to the AGM?  Which brings us back to the question of how to have some say when the AGM does come around…

Thanks for any advice – we are finding the whole process very mysterious and frustrating, which is hard, because we have been waiting a long time to get this dog and we are trying to go about it the right way (i.e. ignoring the advice of friends to just get the puppy and then ignore any angry letters etc…!)!

Cheers

Alex