This week on the podcast we hop into the highly dubious story that appeared in the Sydney Sun-Herald this week about a poor old couple who are facing bankruptcy because of a special levy imposed on their block by a heartless and cruel strata committee …

Hang on! Heartless and cruel? Strata committees can’t set special levies.  And owners corporations have to maintain and repair common property.

The block is 50 years old – has nobody been putting money in the sinking fund? (Rhetorical question – don’t even bother).

More to the point, as we explore in depth here, how come the couple paid $13,000 of the special levy but are now $44k in debt.

And if you think Jimmy tends towards the cynical, wait till you hear Sue’s solution for retired couples who can’t pay their levies because they’re on a fixed income.  FYI, it ain’t setting up a Gofundme appeal.

Also on the pod, based on this story, we look again at how much you need to tell prospective purchasers about problems in your block (a lot, it turns out).

And we look at a case where two top-floor owners took over their roof space and added rooms, without a by-law or a by-your-leave, but the owners corp over-reached in their efforts to put things to rights.

Finally, we have a new promo for our travel website mildrover.com.  Is it an intrusion or a little light relief?  You tell us via mail@flatchat.com.au.

By the way, in case you were wondering, how can we claim in the intro to pod number 180 that we have had 200 episodes? That’s because in the early days we were on a not-very-good podcast platform and our first 20 episode had just a handful of downloads.

Just as well we switched to our current pod host Blubrry and started the count from scratch, we now have literally ten times as many listeners as we had before.

TRANSCRIPT IN FULL

Jimmy  00:00

We have reached a milestone, in terms of the number of downloads and listens on this podcast.

Sue  00:06

Oh, yes, what's that?

Jimmy  00:07

 Just in the past week, we have ticked over 40,000.

Sue  00:13

Wow! Is that 40,000 different people who've listened to us?

Jimmy  00:16

No, it's one person, who's listened 40,000 times.

Sue  00:19

Is that my mum?

Jimmy  00:20

That's the one person who is most likely to have done that. But no, it's good. We've had 200 episodes (almost; we're coming up to our two hundredth. In fact, this might be the two hundredth). That works out at an average of 200 per episode. But the early episodes; like the really early episodes, hardly anyone listened to them, and now we're tracking at just over 50 listens per day.

Sue  00:47

Oh, fantastic!

Jimmy  00:47

 Which is 350 a week, which is pretty good.

Sue  00:50

So people want to keep up-to-date with what's happening with apartments and also, find out what they've missed, perhaps.

Jimmy  00:55

Yes, exactly. I think people listen to it in different ways. Some people listen to it while they're cooking dinner, or while they're driving home from work, or whatever...In the bath.

Sue  01:05

At the EC meeting, when they get bored.

Jimmy  01:07

Just switch this on... They feel that they're getting more out of this, than they are out of their own committee. Oh, we shouldn't say things like that. I'm Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.

Sue  01:19

And I'm Sue Williams and I write about property for Domain.

Jimmy  01:22

And this is the 200th Flat Chat Wrap. We've been getting a bit legal, on Flat Chat this week. A couple of things have come in. One of them is quite interesting, because I have a question for you... If you had a neighbour who was so awful, that you decided to sell up and move out, would you tell the purchasers, that you've got a terrible neighbour?

Sue  02:01

Absolutely not. Because you want to get rid of your apartment, don't you? You want to sell it for the best possible price,