Gold Coast unit blocks where bodies corporate dealing with nightmare owners

From alcoholics, hoarders and dominatrixes to a woman who won’t clean up after her cat, these are the nightmare owners causing chaos in unit blocks. And there’s little body corps can do about it.

A dominatrix slams a whip against the wall during a “live” session in the middle of the night, the smell of cat urine wafts through a large inner-city tower, and a drunk is passed out on her driveway.

It has become a daily nightmare for tens of thousands of unit owners on the Gold Coast as they fight their owner-occupier neighbours from hell in years-long court battles.

Most end up living with it.

One case at a Gold Coast complex involving a suspected alcoholic has been going on for more than six years.

The person urinates and defecates in common areas and is often found passed out.

“Ambulances would be called, they’d come and pick the person up, who’d go to hospital and rehydrate. Three or four hours later they’d be discharged and they’d be back along to the bottle shop and it would start all over again,” said lawyer Jessica Cannon, whose Mermaid Beach-based firm recently merged with Grace Lawyers to create the largest body corporate law firm in Queensland.

The resident has received nuisance orders, damage bills for cleaning common areas and been taken to court, but the toll on other residents has been enormous, Ms Cannon says.

“I’ve known of three owners in there who have tried to sell and they literally cannot sell their properties because the smell is so bad.”

One tenant was said to be found smacking a leather whip against a wall in the early hours of the morning.

Elsewhere, the body corporate has spent years trying to deal with a resident who fails to clean up after her cats, leading to foul odours spreading through the building.

“It would start that the kitty litter would overflow, so the cats would go anywhere else that they can,” Grace Lawyers partner Jason Carlson said.

“So they’d start filling up the shower and the bath and before you know it the entire apartment was filled with cat filth.

“Cat faeces would then be walked into commons areas.

“What the body corporate would do is every six months they would send in professional cleaners to sanitise everything, clean it all up, and send her the bill.

“It was about $15,000 every six months, because they not only had to clean and sanitise the unit, they had to clean and sanitise common areas and relocate affected residents. But she kept on paying the bill and then repeating the behaviour.”

At another unit block, residents complained of being regularly woken by a banging noise between 11pm and 3.30am. It was suspected the noise was from a woman smacking a leather whip against the wall during sessions live-streamed to an online audience. The body corporate struggled to convince her to stop.

One woman fails to clean up after her cats – leading to foul smells through a high-rise building.

In yet another case, a man’s hoarding of papers became so bad it caused the floor below his unit to crack.

Grace Lawyers founder Colin Grace said a process was needed that allowed bodies corporate to deal with such cases, where mental health issues were often involved.

“It needs a process, or access to services,” Mr Grace said.

“The hoarder that cracked the building, we ended up getting his family involved.

“We got them to understand that it was a mental health issue and the guy couldn’t cope.

“Then we ended up enlisting his professional doctors, and psychiatrists, and he was moved out (by the family) to a facility. The body corporate was then able to step in, clean out the apartment, get rid of all the rubbish.

“... But (without the family’s involvement) there was little the body corporate could do, even though there was that much weight it cracked the floor.”

Mr Carlson said bodies corporate could apply to the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management (BCCM) for an adjudicator’s order to deal with nuisance or hazardous behaviours.

If that order was ignored by the problem resident, they could be taken to the Magistrates Court, which has the power to issue fines.

The entire process could take years – with no guarantee the orders or fines would end the problem behaviour.

Mr Carlson said a key issue was that body corporate legislation hasn’t achieved the right balance between an individual’s property rights and a strata community’s ability to deal with problematic behaviours.

“Not everyone is suited for community living. But a BCCM adjudicator doesn’t have the power to evict. We have to manufacture legal solutions to achieve that outcome.

“It often comes about because a problematic owner-occupier may have racked up such a debt that they can’t afford to pay or refuse to pay, which can lead to bankruptcy or a forced sale. That isn’t a nice process for anyone to be involved in.

“You’re talking years of litigation to reach that stage. But often there is no other avenue that is available.”

Mr Carlson said another major headache for bodies corporates was serial complainers bombarding committee members with vexatious gripes and conspiracy theories.

“We’ve been working with a small scheme for years now and they’ve got an owner-occupier who was sending multiple emails a day complaining about things.

“It was such a volume that we were able to get an adjudicator to find that the volume and frequency of the communication amounts to a nuisance, you’re breaching by-laws, stop doing it.

“They made an order saying we’re going to limit you to a two-page letter, once a week, 1000 words, pre-paid post. That’s all the body corporate needs to look at.”

The person then started bombarding the Commissioner’s Office itself with correspondence.

“So for the next six months instead of them writing to our law firm or the body corporate manager and the committee saying, ‘you’re corrupt’, they then started writing to the Commissioner’s Office saying ‘you’re corrupt’,” Mr Carlson said.

“And then they found out that QUT was engaged by the government to review the legislation, so they started writing to the QUT review team. It’s got to the stage now where yesterday I got four emails. This is years after the order was made by the adjudicator.

“There needs to be better remedies for this behaviour. The Strata Community Association (Qld) has been lobbying the Queensland government to provide committees with better protections from this bullying and harassment.”

While bodies corporate had limited options, Ms Cannon said the same could not be said of people looking to buy property in strata schemes, who could have checks performed to ensure they weren’t stepping into a nightmare.

“Buyers can spend $300 to $350 and get a comprehensive body corporate record search where an agent will go out there, look at minutes, and see if there are defects, disputes in the body corporate, what are they forecasting in terms of expenditure,” Ms Cannon said.

“They’re fantastic value but a lot of buyers do not want to spend $350 on that. On the Gold Coast particularly you’d be lucky to get something around the $400,000 mark at the moment, but they won’t spend the money to work out what they’re buying in to.”

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Originally published as Gold Coast unit blocks where bodies corporate dealing with nightmare owners