What a waste – but who pays?

A version of this article has also appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald’s online pages and in the print edition of Domain.

QUESTION: Tenants broke a waste pipe which is attach to the garage wall inside the garage. They hit it whilst entering or exiting the garage.  The owner has asked the Owners Corporation to have the pipe repaired. 

My question is who should pay for repair as the damage is obviously done by the tenant and our owners corporation are getting sick and tired of fixing things that are always broken by tenants. – RTNQ, via Flat Chat Forum.

ANSWER:  We got a response to this as soon as it hit the Flat Chat website.

“As a building manager of a very large scheme in Sydney the process we follow is that the OC would fix the pipe then invoice the owner of the lot,” says Flathcatter Luke. “The owner of the lot could then chase the tenant for the cost of the repair.”

Seems perfectly fair to me although, I have to say that if I was the landlord I would want some sort of proof that it was the tenants (although, as we know, it’s only ever tenants who damage common property).

In most cases if I were the landlord, the word of the building manager would be good enough for me – but would it be enough at the tenancy tribunal if you took  the cost of repair out of the bond?

That said, there are owners out there who think “the strata” is going to pay for everything, regardless of who’s to blame, presumably from the Tooth Fairy Fund.

And there are strata schemes where they do just that in a kind of all for one, one for all, hassle-free, Utopian existence where it all evens out in the end.  Bless!

But for those of you who need a bit more certainty in your dealings with neighbours, there are two basic principles to follow.

The first rule is that if you break common property, you pay for its repair.  The second is that landlords are responsible for the behaviour of their tenants and, while you could theoretically pursue tenants for breakages, it’s easier for the owners corporation to chase the landlords and let them get the money back from  the renters, where appropriate.

It also makes the landlords just a bit more cautious about who they inject into strata communities if they know there are consequences when things go wrong.

There’s more on this HERE on the Flat Chat Forum.