Question: I’ve applied for approval to change the flooring. What rights do I have if I have not been responded to within the appropriate time?
I currently have an application with my Body Corporate Committee to install hard flooring in place of carpet. The bylaws state that hard flooring must be less than 62 dB and include soundproofing underlay with a 5mm thickness to be installed under any hard flooring.
I have submitted the application for flooring with an acoustic report from the manufacturer of 52 dB and 5 mm Acoustic rubber underlay to be installed.
My application has clearly met the requirements of the by-laws however the committee seems to be delaying the decision to provide consent. We are nearing 6 weeks and the committee has since approved my other requests which were on the same email request.
The decision is holding up other works.
I have made several enquiries to the Body Corporate manager as to what the delay is and have only been provided with generic responses in the likes of “we’ve forwarded this to your committee”.
I just want to know what avenues/rights do I have if I have not been provided with a response in the appropriate time frame?
Answer: If it gets to the point where you’ve made a submission and after six weeks, you haven’t heard anything back it’s considered that the motion is defeated
The last part of the question is ‘What are the avenues or rights of the applicant?’. As an individual lot owner, you are entitled to make an application to the committee. You’re entitled to submit up to six motions per year to the committee. The committee has to consider those within six weeks or provide you with the reason why not, or request an extension of some kind. You should activate that part of the legislation. Make a formal application, a proper motion, and then force the committee into having some kind of committee meeting or VOC so that you can get a formal decision one way or another. That’s an avenue open to all lot owners.
Six weeks is quite a long time. It doesn’t always fit with people’s building schedule plans, but that’s what it is. You have to deal with that.
From the community’s perspective, they may agonise over these kinds of applications. It’s not so much the application, but they’re worried about the impact on the person below your unit. Will adding this type of flooring have an impact on that individual? There’s a lot of uncertainty. If you searched up the issue on the internet, you could hear nightmare stories. Committees are a group of individuals who generally have the best interests of the owners at heart. So sometimes, when they are taking a long time to decide, it’s because they’re trying to do the right thing, but they might want to have a definite pathway towards doing that. There might have been problems in the building in the past where people have said, my application is fine and then it’s turned out that there have been problems after the fact. So I think we have to be kind of sympathetic to that kind of issue.
In this case, the lot owner has made an application and the committee should really consider having a vote on it. If they choose to vote no, then the lot owner has right to go to the commissioner’s office.
What I might touch on with this issue is that there is a school of thought that these kinds of flooring renovations don’t need to have approval because it’s whether or not the floors in question are considered the common property or whether they touch the common property or not. I’ve heard some arguments that say, well, if you’ve got the noise bylaw in place, and I hope every building does, that bylaw is sufficient in and of itself as a regulation because the lot owners are not allowed to have the high level of noise transfer from one lot to the other. That’s a school of thought, I don’t know if it really applies. I think it’s worthwhile people making the applications and trying to show as much due consideration to their neighbours as they can.
Submitting Motions and Response Times
In the past, you could submit ideas and questions and things like this and they could go into the void and never be responded to. Obviously, that was a fairly unsatisfying situation. So, QLD legislation changed in March 2021 which now permits owners to submit up to six motions per year to the committee’s consideration and the committee has got six weeks to make a determination, or they can ask the lot owner for an extension beyond that six weeks.
If you’ve made a submission and after six weeks, you haven’t heard anything back, it’s considered that the motion is defeated and you proceed on that basis. If you’re unhappy with this outcome, which you probably would be as an applicant, then you could go to the commissioner’s office and follow through on that basis
I think it’s a very good piece of legislation, and we’ve been encouraging owners to use it more and more where possible because it creates a situation where a decision has to be made. What might have happened in the past, if people ask questions, ‘Can I do this? Is this okay? Is that okay?’ it gets a little bit vague, and then answers come back which are a little bit vague. This goes on for three or four weeks, and then a month, two months and three months and before, you know, a year’s gone by and nothing’s really happening. Everyone’s kind of frustrated and given up.
Having a motion, having a meeting, a decision has to be recorded one way or the other, for better or worse. That gives people a very definite and clear avenue for how to proceed in the event that they’re unhappy with the final decision. I think that’s a good thing for the industry and I would encourage all owners who want an issue discussed to take that pathway because you will get a definite answer. You might get the answer you want, but you will get a definite answer.
This post appears in Strata News #505.
William Marquand
Tower Body Corporate
E: willmarquand@towerbodycorporate.com.au
P: 07 5609 4924
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