Amid high costs and low confidence in the industry, some owner-occupiers are taking on Australia’s commercialised strata system
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The man on the other end of the grainy Zoom call was hunched angrily in his chair. He was no longer taking notes. His sentences had become curt and dismissive. He was our property manager, and we’d just told him we were sacking him.
It was 2024, and this situation had been a few years coming. It began with a leaking roof. The top-floor flat my partner and I bought in a 1940s-era, five-unit apartment building in Melbourne had been someone’s investment property before it became our home. Either their tenants hadn’t complained about leaks or the owners hadn’t cared, but pretty soon the only thing stopping water from streaming through our light fixtures was an array of carefully placed buckets in the roof cavity. The whole thing needed replacing. But there was no money in the owners’ corporation’s maintenance fund.