If NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler has served no other function, he earns our respect and gratitude for being a very useful source of entertaining, informative and occasionally horrifying stories.The latest, from a parliamentary committee meeting, involves an allegation that development company’s executives had tried to smear him with a suggestion that he had demanded a $5million bribe to back off from a development where he’d banned sales until defects were fixed.We pick the bones out of that in the podcast. But Commissioner Chandler isn’t just a fruitful source of juicy tales, and we speculate as to where the next phase of his property development revolution is going.We have heard suggestions that he is now going to turn his fearsome gaze towards buildings that have defects and are still under warranty.Why? Because recognising you have defects in your building and knowing your rights is no guarantee that the developer and builder will fix them. Far from it, in many cases.And we also take a look at how Sydney’s lower north shore seems destined to be the next hot spot for apartments and the shops and services that people want and need in a modern city.All that and more in this week’s Flat Chat Wrap.TRANSCRIPT IN FULLJimmy 00:00We always seem to be just one step ahead of the news on this podcast.Sue 00:05Yes!Jimmy 00:05Last week, we were talking about dodgy developers and them having the same DNA as criminals and this week, we find out that David Chandler has said that a developer (who has been described as 'dodgy' in parliament), tried to implicate him in demanding bribes. So, we'll be talking about that. We'll be talking about the next phase of David Chandler's work, which is remediation of buildings that are less than six years old and have defects. And you're going to tell us about things that are happening on the lower North Shore of Sydney?Sue 00:46Yes, about revitalising CBD's.Jimmy 00:48Okay. I'm Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.Sue 00:54And I'm Sue Williams, and I write about property for Domain.Jimmy 00:56And this is the Flat Chat Wrap. That was a stunning piece of news that came out last week...Sue 01:16It was, wasn't it?Jimmy 01:17Yes, I mean, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and according to David Chandler; at a Parliamentary Estimates Committee meeting, he was talking about the Toplace Group, whom he has identified in the past as being (or they have been named in Parliament), as dodgy developers. They have this very flamboyant CEO, Jean Nassif, who is typical of that kind of person; you know, he was famous for giving his wife, a bright yellow Lamborghini, and of course, that appeared all over social media. They've got a development called Skyview (I think it's in Castle Hill), which David Chandler had slapped an order on, saying, they should not sell any more apartments, until they had fixed defects in the building. According to his testimony at the parliamentary committee, he was at a meeting with them to discuss this, and one of the Toplace executives (who he has not named), read out an email saying 'put $5 million into a trust account, and we can make the Skyview problem go aw
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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.
