Minds over strata matters

Busy, busy, busy in the Flat Chat bunker this week. We start with a wrap-up of what went on at the Owners Corporation Network (OCN) Strata Matters conference last week including a grab-bag of politicians talking about what’s been done and what still needs to be achieved in strata. Then, prompted by a thought from Sydney MP Alex Greenwich that NSW might consider a tax on short-term holiday lets, like the one announced in Victoria, Jimmy rips into the “idiotic” discussion of the proposed tax on Victoria’s short-term holiday lets (aka Airbnb) on the ABC TV Q&A panel discussion. Back to the Strata Matters conference, and we go through the card, picking up on topics as diverse as water saving, levies debts, strata loans, remediation, repairs and adaptation of older buildings. Finally we discuss one of the major themes of the conference collective sales – whereby 75 percent of owners can force the other 25 per cent to sell to developers and how it has all gone horribly wrong in one scheme where the owners and their prospective developers ended up paying the legal fees of an unsuccessful bidder as they fought to prevent the redevelopment going ahead. All that and more in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap. ____________________________________________________ Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia. Find us on Facebook and Twitter and the Flat Chat website. Send comments and questions to [email protected]. Register to ask and answer questions about apartment living anonymously on the website. Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai. Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.