Covid kicks off the podcast again this week, unfortunately, but with both Sydney and Melbourne shut down it’s the first thing that springs to everyone’s mind.However there are some new talking points – like the surprisingly handy Strata Covid Toolkit produced by the NSW government last weekend, which we highly recommend.Then, just when they’ve final acquired some Flat Chat Brownie points, the NSW government goes and stuffs it up by issuing Public Health Orders about who can work where, completely ignoring strata and the people who run it.LISTEN HEREThe in some non-covid chat (praise be!), we talk about some of the astronomical prices being paid for apartments in the Crown tower at Barangaroo.And we recall spending a night in one of the poshest (and worst laid-out) penthouses in Sydney.Then we discover “zoom rooms”, the new name for that awkward corner of apartments that developers don’t know what to do with. Too small to be a study, too impractical to be anything other than a cupboard, now it’s the potential hub of your burgeoning media career.As our picture of US broadcaster Ira Glass (purloined from Medium.com) shows, you don’t need a special room – just a wardrobe with a desk and lots of noise-absorbing clothes.Sue also introduces us to once-desirable areas where rents are 30 per cent lower than they were five years ago. And we get the inside running on the sale of a disgraced League player’s Parra pad.That’s all in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.TRANSCRIPT IN FULLJimmy 0:00 I feel like we're in double duty this week, because we were on Amanda Farmer's podcast, where everybody actually got to see us for a change.Sue 0:09 Yes. Amanda looks so glamorous and we both looked like we just got out of bed.Jimmy 0:15 Well, you had! She does look very glamorous. It was interesting and quite challenging, the three of us trying to speak, all at the same time, often. We still managed to get through a fair bit of material. Today, we've got a few things to talk about. We've got the new strata toolkit from the New South Wales Government. I noticed it's branded 'government,' not health and definitely not Fair Trading. We've got some confusing messages coming out in the public health orders and you've got some stories about rents and the sales of fabulous apartments.Sue 0:57 Yes, that's right.Jimmy 0:58 I'm Jimmy Thomson. I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.Sue 1:04 And I'm Sue Williams and I write about property for Domain.Jimmy 1:07 And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.Late on Friday night (which seems to be when they release anything that has to do anything with strata), the New South Wales government released its strata managers and committees COVID-19 handbook.Sue 1:37 Fantastic.Jimmy 1:38 I'm sorry, it's a toolkit. It's not a handbook, it's a toolkit.Sue 1:41 That's great, isn't it? Isn't that the first time they've done very much for strata people?Jimmy 1:47 Well, yeah. It's kind of like they keep forgetting that we exist and keep forgetting that it's a big chunk of the population and issuing all these very specific rules that leave us out, a lot of the time. We've had the whole thing about wearing a mask inside, but your home is being exc
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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.
