Mascot Towers: NSW government rejects owners’ pleas for financial help

Mascot Towers apartment owners are set to lose more than $700,000 each in a fire sale after the state government rejected their last-minute pleas for assistance.

Mascot Towers apartment owners have been rejected in a last-ditch effort to get state government help before they proceed with a fire sale in which they will lose more than $700,000 each.

A meeting between Better Regulation Minister Kevin Anderson and the Mascot Towers Owners Corporation fell flat on Tuesday, with Mr Anderson refusing numerous requests for assistance.

Mascot Towers apartment owner Treacy Sheehan, with four-year-old son Eamon, will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Owners corporation chairman Gary Deigan asked for the government to either buy the site and repurpose it for affordable housing or loan residents $25 million so they could at least recover their losses and start again. The money would be repaid from numerous legal settlements.

But those offers were denied, leaving many of the block’s 132 apartment owners and nine commercial owners facing financial ruin.

“A lot of the owners are still praying for a miracle but it ain’t going to happen,” Mr Deigan said.

“If we don’t sell there are many owners who will go bankrupt. I am only one of 132 owners who does not have a home to go to at night.”

Mascot Towers was evacuated in mid-2019 after cracking was discovered in the Bourke St building. The owners corporation is scrambling to organise a vote in the next two weeks on a collective sale of the property to a developer for “about $40 million”.

Mascot Towers, on the corner of Bourke St and Church Ave, Mascot.

Visible cracks in the parking lot at Mascot Towers. (IMAGE MONIQUE HARMER)

That would allow developers to knock down and rebuild the property, with owners of apartments originally worth more than $1 million recouping only up to $300,000.

Owners also have to pay back $7 million the government has loaned them for emergency accommodation.

Mascot Towers is claiming more than $15 million in damages against developer Aland and its engineers who, it is alleged, were negligent in their work in developing a block of towers next to Mascot Towers.

“New building regulations were introduced by the NSW Government last year with much fanfare,” Scott Higgins of Mills Oakley, who is representing the Owners Corporation for Mascot Towers, said.

“However, there really wasn’t anything in that package of reforms that could specifically assist the Mascot Towers owners.”

Mascot Towers owners have called on the government to reveal details of any investigations and any action taken against Aland or its engineers on the adjoining project.

Treacy Sheehan bought her apartment for $900,000 and says it would have been worth $1.4 million now if there was no problem with the building. Instead, she will get $300,000 from the collective sale.

“It’s like someone who has been working for 35 years being told they’ve got to give someone all their money,” she said. “It’s completely mad and should not be happening.”

Mr Anderson said the government had never has been a potential purchaser.

“The ball is very much in the court of the owners corporation as to whether they proceed with a collective sale to a private ­developer or remediate the building’s defects,” he said.

Originally published as Mascot Towers: NSW government rejects owners’ pleas for financial help