Jimmy 00:00
This should be quite a short podcast this week. It's Anzac Day; we're running a little bit late, but we've got to produce one every week and this is it. A couple of interesting stories have come up., Sue. There's a flat in...
Sue 00:15
Dudley.
Jimmy
I didn't realise it was in Dudley. Well, let's talk about this. There's a flat in Britain that's for sale, with a prison cell in the corner. And there's another story about how we are being digitally manipulated...
Sue 00:32
Or digitally duped. That's hard to say, isn't it?
Jimmy 00:35
So is digitally manipulated, I can tell you...This is in property advertising pictures. And, I want to talk about Lawyer in the Hot Seat, which I recorded this week with David Bannerman, where I had eight pages of questions to get through and we barely got through two.
Sue 00:38
In how long?
Jimmy 00:55
An hour. That will be coming up as your podcast next week, so we'll have a quick chat about that. I'm Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.
Sue 01:05
And I'm Sue . I write about property for the Sydney Morning Herald, the AFR, the Melbourne Age and Domain.
Sue 01:11
It does, yes. It's in Dudley, which is in the West Midlands, just near Birmingham. I got my first job in Dudley as a journalist, because that's the home of the biggest independent newspaper in Britain. I got a job with them.
Jimmy 01:11
And this is the Flat Chat Wrap. Sue, you came across a really funny story; it's in Domain, which is your Domain, about a flat in Britain, which has a prison cell in the corner of the room. Now, this has special significance for you, Sue . Well, not Dudley, the West Midlands.
Sue 01:50
The West Midlands, yes. They had 22 editions throughout the Western Midlands.
Jimmy 02:01
What was the name of the paper?
Sue 02:02
The Express and Star. The head office was in Wolverhampton, which I felt was a horrible place; it's so cold all the time. And one of the first offices I went to, they sent me to Dudley, which was a problem, because although I was a really excitable young journalist, Dudley has one of the strongest accents in the whole of Britain, because it's the furthest point from the sea. And they say it's very close to Chaucerian English. The accent is so hard to understand.
Jimmy 02:31
Like comedian, Lenny Henry.
Sue 02:32
Lenny Henry's from there, yes, absolutely. I was trying to interview people and I had no idea what they were actually saying to me and bizarrely, they had no idea what I was asking them either, because they just couldn't understand what they said was my 'London accent.' They called me 'London girl' all the time.
Jimmy 02:41
Is there any reason why an apartment in Dudley should have a prison cell in the corner?
Sue 02:56
Well, this was a refurbishment of an existing building and it was the local police station, which I remember very well. I used to go there all the time for our news. They've built a fabulous new HQ somewhere else and it's no longer needed. So this old stone building, they've turned into apartments. And on the ground floor is a kind of interesting feature... In the studio apartment, which is quite large, they've left a jail cell in the corner, just as a feature.
Jimmy 03:25
It's like one of these ones you see in cowboy films; it's all bars and things.
Sue 03:29
That's right. It's just like a barred box and edit looks very, very weird.
Jimmy 03:36
I can think of people who would be desperate to have something like that, especially people with small children.
Sue 03:41
That's a good idea. Well, in the advert, they've said it could be a bedroom, because it's just a studio apartment. Or they said it could be an adjunct to the kitchen, like a feature dining room. That would be quite interesting. And obviously, you kind of think a brothel keeper might take it, for nepharious reasons. I mean, it's $360 Australian dollars a week, which seems cheap.
Jimmy 04:13
Oh, it's for rent?
Sue 04:15
Yes. It's still with the real estate agent, so they're renting it out. So $360 Australian dollars a week, which is quite cheap, for a studio. That's not Sydney prices, but in Dudley... One of the most godforsaken places on Earth. It was just so cold and so miserable and I couldn't understand anyone and they couldn't understand me. There was this character called 'the Black Country Butcher,' because Dudley was in the Black Country and so-called because apparently, Queen Victoria rode through in her carriage one day, and there's all the coal dust and smoke and terrible air and she closed the curtains; snapped them shut, because she didn't want to look at such an ugly place.
Jimmy 05:01
It was the heart of the Industrial Revolution, wasn't it?
Sue 05:04
That's right. It wasn't the most wonderful of areas and they kept sending me to the Black Country Butcher, who had the most incredible accent; it was just impossible. Everybody in the office thought it was really funny to send a junior out there. It was just horrible.
Jimmy 05:22
So he wasn't a serial killer?
Sue 05:23
No, he wasn't. He was actually a butcher and as a vegetarian, I didn't like it anyway. But he was the man who knew everything about Dudley. His family had been there for hundreds of years and he was 'Mr. Dudley,' really. So he was the source for lots of stories (if you could understand him, of course). Alot of the reporters who worked in the Dudley office were actually from Dudley, so they had no problem whatsoever. For them, it was a continual source of amusement to send me there.
Jimmy 05:54
Well, we'll throw up a link to the flat with a jail cell.
Sue 05:59
Just in case anybody fancies a holiday.
Jimmy 06:01
They should put it on Airbnb. And the other real estate story, while we're on the topic, is again from your Domain;, are we being duped by artificially-enhanced real estate pictures? That's sloppy cheating. It's the worst kind of cheating. If you're going to cheat, do it right. We've been dabbling in the real estate market recently, with an investment and I do recall looking at pictures from the inside of some of the apartments in the complex, where we have our investment and thinking there's no way they could get that view.
Sue 06:19
And it seems we are. I mean, there's quite strict rules around enhancing real estate pictures. They can make a property look as good as it possibly can, but they can't really change many of the features. This was a piece by Alice Stolz, the editor of Domain. It was really interesting; it was shown on channel nine. She showed a number of examples; one where there was a house that was still being built really and just outside, it was mud and earth and there was a tractor out there doing something, but on the ad they'd actually put in turf. It was all just turfed over; even the driveway to the house, which was a bit of a mistake. It looked really nice, because you had all this green turf, and then you have the nice, newly-built house. They had a picture from inside the house, but they've forgotten to change the view out of the window. So out the window, you can see all this mud and earth, so they hadn't even done it properly. That's right... Quite close to the ocean.
Jimmy 07:48
It feels like you're sort of on the edge of a cliff, looking straight down into the ocean. And in fact, the sea is about 300-400 metres away, if not more. And you think, could it be that that is a view from the balcony, and then they've just increased the size of it to fill the frame? It's so easy to do. This is why I'm annoyed about the sloppy cheating; it is really easy to do these things. But I wonder if that's false advertising? If you're making it look like a building is much closer to the ocean, or the beach, or the trees, or the hills, or whatever, than it actually is. Or if you're showing a view of hills that are away in the distance, but look closer, and you're cutting out the road that runs past the apartment, or the house... That's very dodgy, isn't it?
Sue 08:42
Yes. And all those pictures should be labelled as that.
Jimmy 08:45
Digitally altered.
Sue 08:47
Yes. 'This view is enlarged for cosmetic reasons,' or something like that. One of the examples Alice used, which was really funny... There was a nice little house, but over it was this massive, massive water tower just behind it, completely overwhelming the house. And yet in one of the pictures of the house, you couldn't see this water tower at all. Alice suggested that maybe somebody was lying down and taking the picture from the ground, in order to cut out the picture of the water tower, because the water tower wasn't there. It was amazing.
Jimmy 09:24
I remember that controversy a couple of years ago, about the crowded beaches, and there was pictures in the paper and the beach (I think was Bondi), looked absolutely mobbed. But somebody went along and said it's because of the angle of the photograph, which has been really flat and basically into the heads of the people on the beach, but if you actually raised it up and looked down at an angle, you could see the beach was almost empty.
Sue 09:52
There's lots of ways that media can be manipulated in that way. I've got this new book out, called Run for your Life and this guy used to live in Russia and the first anniversary of Princess Di's death, all the Russian newspapers reported that nobody had taken any notice; they've completely forgotten her and it was all over. Whereas in fact, the streets of London were crowded with mourners, going to pay their respects. But the Russian newspapers had taken pictures of the streets at something like four in the morning, when they were completely empty and they just published them like that.
Jimmy 10:27
Fake news has been around for a long time.
Sue 10:32
We're getting better at it really. With AI and fabulous digital tools to manipulate pictures...
Jimmy 10:38
I remember a couple of years ago, you did a book, Women of the Outback. You took pictures of a First Nations woman and her sister, outside their community centre that they ran, and then the sister died in the interim. I spent hours removing her from the picture, because it would have been offensive to have shown that. And I'm carefully moving wooden planks from one side of the picture to the other and you think, these days, it would just be so easy. You've got cameras that will do that for you. You just run your finger around the outline of the thing you don't want, or the person you don't want and it takes it out and fills up the background. When we come back, we're going to talk about what David Bannerman and I spoke about in Lawyer in the Hot Seat and what will be in next week's podcast. Eight pages of questions they sent me from Bannerman's Lawyers (who are one of our sponsors), that I had to ask David Bannerman, the lawyer... We basically got through two in an hour.
Sue 11:54
Were the questions really complex? Was it really difficult?
Jimmy 11:59
All strata questions are complex.
Sue 12:01
They always lead on to other things, don't they?
Jimmy 12:03
They do. And the other thing... I hadn't realised, and this is this actually feeds into something, a debate that's been going on between me and a reader on our forum, where I've been saying (and this is related to strata rolls, and whether or not strata rolls should have owner's email addresses on them). I've been saying that the law says you've got to maintain the strata roll. If the owners have given their email addresses for the purpose of delivery of information, that has to be in the strata roll and if they haven't given that email address, then they should provide another one. And this reader is quite a loyal Flat Chatter and was saying that's all very well, what the law says, but what it actually means, could be something else. And I've been saying I don't care; until somebody says in a tribunal or a court case that no, you don't have to put the email addresses on and no, you don't have to provide the strata roll, that's what I'm going to go by. It was interesting talking to David about this, because I was both wrong and right, at the same time,
Sue 13:11
How can you be both wrong and right about this?
Jimmy 13:13
I was wrong in saying that whatever it says in the Strata Schemes Management Act, is the law as would be applied, because he was saying that all through the Act, there are certain things that are prescriptive; legislative, if you want, which usually come with a penalty attached. So you can tell they're serious. 'You've got to do this, you've got to not do that.' There are other things that are regulatory, which don't have penalties attached (but could have penalties attached, if the tribunal decided that way). There are other things that are kind of... I wouldn't say suggestions, but they're instructive, rather than prescriptive.
Sue 13:57
Is other law like this; law in other..
Jimmy 13:59
Apparently yes, but strata law is full of this stuff, because they keep fiddling with it. He was saying back in the day, they'd bring out the law, and it would go through several readings in Parliament, then they would publish it. And that was it. It was a chunk of paper that sat in a legal library somewhere. And if they wanted to change it, they'd have to go through the whole rigmarole of getting the changes approved, and then getting them put into the law and getting the law reprinted. Now, they basically say to the Minister 'we want to change this.' He goes 'that'll be fine. We'll just put it through as an amendment' and somebody sits and types it in on a computer and there it is; suddenly it's law.
Sue 14:44
So they're just kind of tinkering with it all the time?
Jimmy 14:46
Yes and it's changing all the time. I recall having been involved in one of these arguments about 'the law says this' and 'the law doesn't say that' and going I'm just going to prove myself correct. And I go back and I look for the section of the law and it's not there anymore; it's gone. What's happened there? It says something different. So he was saying that there are two levels: there's the stuff that you've got to abide by, or you could get fined and there's stuff that's kind of... He said that one of the examples is the notice period for strata meetings. Now, that is laid out in the law. What happens if you have a meeting that doesn't abide by those timings, like giving due notice? Or, the agenda turns up and it's been changed slightly; does that mean the whole meeting is invalid? And he said no. You can go to tribunal and the tribunal may day 'he hasn't ticked all the boxes, but the intention is there.'
Sue 15:41
Wow. That sounds a bit like a catch-all.
Jimmy 15:44
It's a real 'get out of jail free' for a lot of things. It seems like me quoting the law on what should be in the strata roll and saying "it's there in black and white, therefore, it has to be abided by," I was kind of wrong. But then when I brought up that specific issue with David, he said no, you've got to have it on the strata roll, you've got to have the email addresses on the strata roll. You've got to make the strata roll available to all owners. And if they don't have the actual email address that the owner uses for communication, you can ask to see all the communications, with a couple of exceptions, which is stuff that's legally privileged. If you are in dispute with your strata scheme, and they have communications between the strata scheme and the lawyers, you can't really insist on seeing that, because that's covered by different laws of privilege. But basically, you can go in and say I want to see the strata roll. I want the strata roll to have all the email addresses. And if they don't provide the email address, you say I want to see all communications, because the email addresses will be on there. And I said "well, okay, in this world of some things are the law and some things are kind of suggestions, what would you do if your strata manager refused to pass on the information?" He said "you go to tribunal, and you get an order." I was wrong about the letter of the law being what applies, but I was right about the strata roll and email addresses. One of the interesting things that came up was the Design and Building Practitioners Act. I don't know if you're familiar with it; this is one of David Chandler's introductions. He was concerned about people getting renovations done in apartment blocks by cowboys, basically, which undermine potentially, the whole fabric of the building. And so they brought in this thing where you've got to get a qualified designer, or an architect to approve your renovations for any work over $5,000.
Sue 18:00
Wow, that's not much work, is it really?
Jimmy 18:02
How can you get around that? That's basically everything you would ever do. Anything you would do that was significant in a building is going to cost more than that. And people are saying well, look, I've got a $6,000 job, but I'm having to be another $15,000 to get an architect to sign off on it, which some people are saying is pushing people into going "let's just just do it and don't tell anyone," and that's not a good thing.
Sue 18:03
Raise the thresholOh, okay. So any changes over $10,000?
Jimmy 18:39
$20,000.
Sue 18:39
That makes sense.
Jimmy 18:40
But you know, you still have to ensure that the people who are getting the work done are qualified, know what they're doing, and that you will take responsibility for anything that goes wrong thereafter. But $20,000 is a much more reasonable level. I think David was saying that Fair Trading are sort of edging towards that.
Sue 19:03
Okay. So there's an organisation of strata lawyers, isn't there?
Jimmy 19:07
The Australian College of Strata Lawyers.
Sue 19:11
Are they putting pressure on Fair Trading to try and change that?
Jimmy 19:14
I would imagine so, yes. They seem to becoming quite active. They've certainly been very vocal on the whole SCA, Strata Community Association, and their recent problems.
Sue 19:28
Because I'm just doing a story about whether you should renovate or remain. It is difficult, because renovating apartments, you've got the expense of construction costs, which have blown out, you've got the shortage of tradies, which means that good qualified builders can charge you whatever they want, because there's so much demand for their services. And then you've got all the extra costs of certifying the work, so it does seem to be a major disincentive to renovating anything.
Jimmy 20:00
Yes. Probably easier to sell the place and let somebody else come in and do it. I think we've discussed in the past; would you renovate before you sold and the answer is often no, because people are going to have their own ideas.
Sue 20:15
That's right. Well, what they're all doing now, it's just like a really little cosmetic renovation before they sell. That just means a new paint job, or new handles on doors and things, but nothing major whatsoever, because it's just too expensive. It's just too difficult. So leave it to the next person.
Jimmy 20:34
Don't move the bathroom into the jail cell. Another thing we discussed briefly was the power of a non-viable bylaw. People get bylaws drawn up, which fail the test of being unfair, discriminatory... Well, no, the actual test in the Act. Unfair and discriminatory and harsh, I think are the three things. I asked David, is there any value in just passing a bylaw that might not survive a test at the tribunal, but actually sends out a signal to people? You could have a bylaw about not parking cars in this area, or not having kids playing ball games in the swimming pool. Now, you pass that dubious bylaw, and what might happen is that an owner might come along and say 'that's unfair. I'm going to challenge it,' and they have to go through all the hassle of doing that. More likely, they'll just go 'Oh, alright. We won't play ballgames in the swimming pool anymore.' Even though it's not, strictly speaking, legally enforceable, it still has the same effect as if it was. I don't know if that's a particularly good example. But you know, you want to send out a signal. You could create a bylaw that says 'no barbecues above a certain size on your balcony.' Somebody could challenge that, but they 'd probably look at it and go 'I'll just get a smaller barbecue,' because that makes more sense.
Sue 20:54
The pub test.
Sue 22:11
Or 'because I'm on a higher floor, nobody can actually see my Bbq.' It doesn't apply to me.
Jimmy 22:23
And finally, we've got a big piece on the website about what Strata Community Australia is doing; their internal investigation and independent investigation, following the Netstrata scandal. And it's been really funny, because I wrote to their PR and said 'are you guys doing anything?' And he wrote back and said 'well, as you know, we're doing this and this and this, but we're also doing this. And this is all listed in the article on the website.' I suddenly realised they haven't been sending me anything, ever since I fell out with a previous president. SCA seems.. I won't say blacklisted me, that's probably putting it a bit strongly...
Sue 23:04
They've expunged you.
Jimmy 23:05
They have dropped me off their mailing list.
Sue 23:09
So are you going to get back on it?
Jimmy 23:10
I think so. They were very keen to talk to me when I communicated with them. And tomorrow, I will be writing them and saying 'am I off your your list?' Or maybe, I've blacklisted them? I was getting so many aggressive emails from their former president that I told him 'I'm blocking you. I don't want your name to appear in my inbox.' Which is probably a bit childish, but seriously, you know what it's like; you open up your emails and say "oh god! Another one from this person!" Maybe I've been blocking them... I know that sense of dread, because we've both been watching this new TV series on Netflix, Baby Reindeer. Oh my god! It's about a woman stalking a man... A Scottish woman.
Sue 24:09
And he receives so many emails from her everyday; just constantly.
Jimmy 24:18
I just hasten to add that I have not been stalked by anyone at SCA so far.
Sue 24:24
No, we're not making that comparison.
Jimmy 24:26
But it was funny; I was looking into this and I've done a piece for the Fin Review, which I'm hoping will run this weekend. Just to get a sense of the turmoil now that there is in strata management, and I responded to somebody (I'm not going to name them, even though I should), on LinkedIn. And this guy responded...First of all he put 'sigh' and then he says basically "clickbait," because I'd mentioned embedded networks. And he hadn't mentioned embedded networks in his thing. I thought, you know, just shoot the messenger. That is not how you're going to get people to have more confidence in strata management. And then I was reading his email and you know this thing about Netstrata and how they weren't taking commissions. You know, it's illegal to take commissions without reporting them. But they had an insurance arm and it was taking a skim of some sort. So they were making profits from insurance, but they didn't have to declare them. They weren't doing anything illegal. They were doing stuff that was just kind of dodgy and this guy who's having a pop at me for clickbait has in his post 'this is going on all over the place with some of the biggest companies and it will all come out in the wash.' I thought, right! You want clickbait, brother? And on that note, we better go. Next week, hopefully, we'll have a slightly edited version of the Lawyer in the Hot Seat session I did with David Bannerman. I know that's always popular with Flat Chat listeners. Thanks Sue, for coming in and giving up part of your day off. I know you're busy working on your next book, but it's always good to sit here and have a chat, rather than just rambling on. Thanks for listening to the Flat Chat Wrap podcast. You'll find links to the stories and other references on our website flatchat.com.au. And if you haven't already done so, you can subscribe to this podcast completely free on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcatcher. Just search for Flat Chat Wrap with a W, click on subscribe and you'll get this podcast every week without even trying. Thanks again. Talk to you again next week.