This article discusses disabled parking strata rental rules, including whether such spaces can be leased, who controls them, and the role of by-laws and development consent.
Question: The owner of the cafe on the ground floor of our building is privately renting our only disabled car space in our underground car park to a man who is storing his vintage car in the space. Is this legal?
Answer: Check the by-laws and the development consent documents for your building to determine whether a resident is able to rent out a car space to a person who lives outside the building.
Lot’s to unpack here!
If the disabled parking space you refer to is common property, only the owners corporation has any legal right to deal with it. If that’s the case, the owner of the café is essentially fraudulently charging the vintage car owner to park in a common property space to which neither of them has any exclusive rights. If this is the case, the owners corporation should intervene immediately.
However, further investigation will be required if the space forms part of the café owner’s lot as opposed to being common property. You will be able to determine this by looking at the registered strata plan for your scheme.
Often, one or more lots within a strata scheme will be deemed accessible lots and will have a car space painted with the blue and white accessibility logo. This is to satisfy development consent conditions, but the car space remains solely for use by that lot.
In this case, you will need to check the by-laws and the development consent documents for your building to determine whether a resident is able to rent out a car space to a person who lives outside the building.
This post appears in Strata News #697.
Edward Baker
Responsive Strata
E: edward.baker@responsivestrata.com.au
P: 0493 970 875
Leave a Reply