What do you do when you want the shared responsibility of strata but don’t particularly want to live with people above and below you?You buy or rent a townhouse, which is the fancy-pants modern name for what we used to call terraces.It seems that while pre-sales and construction of apartments are going down, sales of townhouses are on the way up and in this week’s podcast, we discuss why that might be.Listen HereThen we turn our gazes south to Victoria where their new strata laws have just passed. OK, they won’t come into force until December, but we ask if they are blazing a trail for NSW strata laws to follow.And we preview Sue’s trip to the front line – well, a new apartment block under construction – with Building Commissioner David Chandler. Will she need body armour? Will he? It’s all in the Flat Chat Wrap.Transcript in fullJimmy 00:00So, it seems that people are buying fewer apartments, but more townhouses.Sue 0:07Oh, like strata townhouses?Jimmy 00:10Yep, most townhouses are strata these days, even in Randwick, where they tried to make everybody have company title.Sue 00:18Right.Jimmy 00:20There's that, and there's big changes to the law in Victoria, so we'll be talking about that. I'm Jimmy Thomson. I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.Sue 00:31And I'm Sue Williams. I write about property for Domain.Jimmy 00:35And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.[MUSIC] JimmyOkay, Sue, there's new figures from a company run by your old sparring partner, Dr. Andrew Wilson.JimmyWhat they've indicated is that the government has been pumping money into the building sector; most of that money is going into stand-alone houses. The number of purchases (or the builds starting), for apartments has actually plummeted. It's going right down, but going down by less, is townhouses. You look at the graph (and the graph is on the Flat Chat website)…I'd say in about six months, it could actually meet; the number of townhouses, and the number of apartments are going to be about the same, which shows a big shift in people's thinking about how they want to live. They want to live in strata, because of the benefits of that, but they don't want to necessarily live in apartments. Why is that?Sue 01:57I wonder if that's the influence of the downsizers on the market. A lot of older people are a bit more nervous about moving into apartments, if they've never lived in them before. They're a bit anxious about having to deal with an owner’s corporation or a body corporate. I was talking to someone the other day from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. They were saying that, often older people were a bit nervous about moving into apartments, if they've never lived in them before, because they're nervous about who their neighbors might be, and whether there's going to be a noise above them, or next to them or below them.They can't quite get their head around the fact that (hopefully), apartments are built to be almost soundproof, but you know, I grew up in a terrace house… We heard everything our neighbors said; both sides of us and it wasn't such a big deal really. You just kind of got used to it. Well, I didn’t know anything different when I was a kid.Ji
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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.
