No sooner had we said last week that Queensland needed to look at their “collective sales” laws – allowing a super majority of owners to compel the minority to sell their units – than the state government there announced that’s exactly what they plan to do.
The precise process for this remains to be thrashed out in parliamentary committeesn, but you are dealing with a community that values – possibly over-values – property owners’ rights to do what they want with the home that they own (unless, of course, those rights have been sold off by the developer).
And there’s a reason this was known as “forced sales” when the idea was first mooted in NSW that 75 per cent of owners could over-ride the wishes of the other 25 per cent and sell off their building – especially one that was well past its use-by date and could be replaced by something that made more efficient use of the available space.
We also take a quick squiz at other body corporate law changes on the table, such as removing unreasonable bans on pets, curbing smoking on common property and allowing bodies corporate to tow vehicles that are blocking common property.
Later on, we discuss the announcement that the Victorian Building Authority is teaming up with the Australian Tax Office to identify phoenixing builders and prevent them from starting up again after they have shut down and walked away from their debts in previous projects.
And we’ll be looking at a massive much-rejected development project that just won’t go away and which we’ve called “Big Trouble in Little Bay”.
All that and more in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap podcast.
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.
