Question: A sale was lost because individual lot owners lobbied the strata manager not to approve a pet application from a prospective purchaser. Can the individual lot owners be taken to court by the lot owner who lost the sale?
Answer: It is important to realise that the decision whether or not to grant permission to keep a pet is the decision of the owners corporation, not the lot owners who lobbied the strata manager.
It’s unlikely the vendor could successfully sue the lot owners who opposed the pet application.
In answering this question, three assumptions are made: the first is that the owners corporation’s by-law on pets requires permission to keep a pet; the second is that the sales contract was conditional on that permission being granted and allowed the purchaser to rescind the contract if the permission was not granted; and the third is that the decision to deny the application was unreasonable.
It is important to realise that the decision whether or not to grant permission to keep a pet is the decision of the owners corporation. It is not the decision of the lot owners who lobbied the strata manager to deny permission and it is not the decision of the strata manager. Therefore, if the vendor was looking to sue anyone, it would be the owners corporation and not the lot owners or the strata manager.
If the decision to deny permission was unreasonable, then remedies against that decision are set out in the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 including an application to NCAT seeking approval to keep a pet on the grounds that the owners corporation’s decision to deny permission was unreasonable. In that NCAT case, the respondent is the owners corporation and not the lot owners or strata manager.
There is no remedy under Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 or in NCAT to seek damages for the lost sale.
Any decision whether or not to sue anyone should only be taken after getting legal advice because evidence, documents and further information about the facts will be required before that advice can be given. If the assumptions set out above are not accurate, then that may also affect the legal advice given.
This post appears in the April 2022 edition of The NSW Strata Magazine.
Carlo Fini Lawyer (NSW)