 Good morning everybody and thank you for joining us in today's webinar. My name's Lynne Smith and I'm the Senior Community Education Officer with the RTA. In collaboration with the Body Corporate and Community Management Commissioner's Office today, our topic is about tenancies in body corporates and also the services that the Commissioner's Office provides. I appreciate your time is valuable and this session should run for approximately 30 minutes. In today's session you will be able to submit questions so if you look on the bottom of your screen you will be able to type some questions in there and press send. We will answer as many questions as we can during the session and also at the end if it's relating obviously to today's topic which is the body corporate side of things. So today's topics we're going to look at the body corporate bylaws in a tenancy. Issues that happen in a tenancy that are in relation to the common properties and body corporate. We're going to meet the Commissioner. We have an interview with the Commissioner to play. We're also going to talk about the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 97 and the regulations. The body corporate services including their dispute resolution service and adjudication service and also to where to go to get more information. As said we will look at doing questions throughout the session as well as at the very end. So with us today we have our guest speaker which is Christine Partridge from the Office of the Commissioner for the Body Corporate and Community Management. That is such a mouthful. So welcome today Christine. Thank you Leanne. So when it comes time to have it in your tenancy agreement you should actually have body corporate bylaws particularly if it's in a unit or a building or a townhouse complex that have bylaws that's attached to them. So in the general tenancy agreement if there are bylaws on item 16 of page 2 of your general tenancy agreement you'll need to complete this. It's really important to make sure that you do have the correct bylaws relating to this particular scheme and that the tenant is given a copy of those bylaws. So maybe for managers make sure that they have a talk to the owner of the unit or the townhouse to get that copy of those bylaws at the start. The types of bylaws will mainly include things like on your common areas where the pets are allowed, behaviour of guests that come onto the property and also the appearance of lots on the property as well. As you can see in clause 22 of your general tenancy agreement the tenant must comply with the bylaws and this is where it also talks about that the tenant is given a copy of any body corporate bylaws. So the types of issues that we see in unit complexes seem to involve most of the following that we have up on the screen. So pets, whether the pets are allowed in the unit complex, some complexes do allow pets and that might be a certain size, type or weight where some of the other complexes will say that the bylaws will be no pets at all. It's really important to ensure that as a manager or the owner of the unit that you're aware of what your bylaws state for that complex before you are accepting any application from a tenant with a pet. Parties or loud music, loud noise. This would also fall into your tenancy laws where the tenant agrees not to interfere with the reasonable peace and comfort and privacy of your neighbours but also to part of the bylaws would also have about the behaviour of guests and that they bring into the complex. Parking, sometimes this is also an issue particularly if an occupier or a tenant has a second vehicle and there's only one vehicle space allocated to the tenancy so it's really making sure that the commencement of that tenancy or your management that you're aware of what the parking availability is for the occupant at the time. Again some of your bylaws will actually look at the rules about the use of balconies and that could be like things like hanging clothes over the balcony rails or using like barbecues and things like that on the balconies as well. Maintenance issues, this sometimes does come up as well and this could be things like in your common areas such as your stairwell lights, your security gates, lifts, common areas that's used such as your pools and your gyms in the bigger complexes. So again it's really important up front to understand how maintenance is also recorded at the start of your tenancy and also keep in mind one thing that we're aware of is under the Body Corporate Act. There's a requirement for details of a tenant to be forward to the body corporate or their manager if the tenancy agreement is in place for six months or longer. Okay so just to show you some of those parts in your tenancy agreement so this is the tenancy use of the property and as you'll see in item 2C, interfere with the reason or piece, comfort or privacy of a neighbour of a tenant and also do as well or allowing another person to do that and this is your part in relation to about pets. So on your page where it's got item 17.1, whether pets are approved or not and this is again part of your general tenancy agreement. So we have an interview that we have with Mr Chris Irons. Chris is the Body Corporate Commissioner for Queensland so we're just going to play that video. So we're going to play the interview for you now so just bear with us. On behalf of the RTA I'd like to welcome today's guest speaker, Chris Irons, the Commissioner from the Body Corporate and Community Management for Queensland. Welcome today Chris. Thanks for having me, Lynn. So Chris tell me about your office. So my office provides information and dispute resolution services for Queensland's community title sector. We have about 45,000 community title schemes in Queensland. That's about 430,000 individual lots, proposing apartments, fillers, service departments, holiday leading and commercial lots. As I say, we provide information and dispute resolution services. Our information service is provided largely by our call back service over the phone and we also provide information in writing. We also provide a number of online products and we maintain a website which we are constantly updating for everyone's use. One of our new developments is an online inquiry form. So rather than you having to email us with a lot of information and you not being sure about what the information is, our new online inquiry form will actually prompt you to fill in bits of information so that we can give you a better answer. Our website is www.qld.gov.au forward slash body corporate. Chris tell me about your agitation and your conciliation process at your office. Well I guess it's fair to say that when people live in a community title scheme they're living close to each other but it's also they're living in their home. So inevitably when things go awry a dispute may arise. So our office exists to try and resolve their disputes and we try and focus on resolving them as early as possible and with as little interference and as little involvement as we can. So that's why there's an obligation on people to try and resolve things themselves in the first instance. When that doesn't happen and they come to our office we provide conciliation and adjudication. Conciliation is going to be the first step in pretty much most of our disputes and it's a particularly good way of resolving some common disputes around what we would call bylaw matters such as issues about pets, noise, parking also maintenance issues. As I say it will be more or less an mandatory first step in the vast majority of situations. Adjudication as the name suggests is a bit more of a formal step. It's done on written submissions and it results in a legally binding order which can then be enforced and appealed through the courts and tribunals processes. There are brief forms and fees for both of those and our website has a lot of information not just the application itself or the fees but information about how to complete the application, what sort of documents you need to provide and how the process will work. We're here to help so we would always recommend that if there is a dispute contact our information service that's what it's there for to try and assist and indeed mitigate against those disputes on 1800 060 119 or to the website www.qld.gov.au forward slash body corporate. I'd like to hand over to Christine because this is all about the Body Corporate and Community Management Act of 97. So over to Christine to talk about your particular act that you govern. Thanks Lynn. So firstly I'd like to start with what a body corporate is. So body corporate is a legal entity which is created when land is subdivided and registered under the land title act to establish a community title scheme. All the owners in the scheme are automatically members of the body corporate when they buy their lot. So community title schemes in Queensland are governed by the Body Corporate and Community Management Act and five regulation modules. These are the standard module regulation, accommodation module, commercial module, small schemes module which applies for six lots or less and the specified two lot schemes module. Owners and all public can obtain a copy of the community management statement from the title's registry. It's a public document and is a document that records all the details for each scheme including the bylaws. If a body corporate does not have a CMS then it's likely not to fall under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act or the regulations. One of these examples might be the South Bank Corporation Act. Schemes in South Bank fall under that legislation rather than body corporate legislation. So the Act and regulations outline the roles and responsibilities of the body corporate as well as owners and occupiers. Great. So Christine you've got some stats here to share with us in relation to the number of schemes that Queensland has so over to you again. That's right, most customers find this interesting to see the increase from year to year. So as you can see from the slide as of March 2006 there was over 45,000 schemes in Queensland and that equates up to over 431,000 lots. There is a list there of how many schemes per module. The two lot scheme module is the lowest however it only came in in 2011. So that's a fairly large uptake since then. Great. So these are divided again by the top six local authorities by the number of schemes. As you would expect Gold Coast is the top with the highest number of schemes in Queensland and Toomba being number six. And then again by number of lots according to the local authorities. So this has altered the order. Brisbane City exists of over 138,000 lots in total and Logan City is now number six at over 14,000 lots. You can see that Brisbane tops the list and that can be because they have more lots in the actual rather than schemes. So they got bigger lots but smaller less schemes. Okay great thanks Christine. So in relation to the body corporate so what actually is the body corporate and more the point what do they actually do? So as I said earlier it's the legal entity consisting all owners in the scheme so each owner becomes a member of the body corporate automatically. They then elect a committee who administer the common property and the body corporate assets for the benefit of all owners and occupiers. The body corporate is required to comply with the laws when doing so and they can actually make decisions at both meetings, committee and general meetings. So community title scheme must consist of two or more lots and common property. Right. Further duties of the body corporate consist of maintaining common property on behalf of all owners and occupiers and making and enforcing bylaws. A body corporate makes decisions either through its committee or at a general meeting. Each body corporate must maintain records that include things like meeting minutes and records of its decisions, financial records and authorizations. Any interested person can obtain copies of those records. A body corporate may also engage a body corporate manager however that's not compulsory in Queensland. So for a bit more on bylaws the body corporate has an obligation under the legislation to enforce its bylaws. It does this by issuing what the legislation refers to as a contravention notice. Now this must be sent directly to the person who is allegedly contravening the bylaw. So if this is the occupier of the lot it's sent to the occupier and a copy to the owner. The notice must identify the bylaw which is being contravened, how the owner is contravening it and give time for the person to remedy the contravention. If necessary a body corporate can organize entry to the premises and that must be given to the occupant of the unit, whether owner or occupier and seven days notice must be given unless it's an emergency. Now Lynne I'll get you to talk about the tenancy termination if those breaches continue. I find it really interesting because it's really clear that the body corporate cannot evict a tenant that they do have to follow the residential tenancies and room accommodation act 2008 rules in relation to ending a tenancy. So as much as obviously the contravention notice can be issued realistically to if a tenant does breach those notices or in relation to breaching the general tenancy then it is following the residential tenancies act in relation to issuing a notice to remedy breach which is a form 11 giving them a minimum seven days notice to rectify the problem and then should that not be rectified there's a process in relation to issuing the notice to leave. So look we might as well pause here just for a moment Christine if that's okay. We've got some questions coming through quite a few questions so thank you for lodging them through. Christine one of the questions is what about the approval process for pets in complex so in complexes so what would be the process and how long would that take to get approval? Okay that's a common question we get. The critical aspect is to review the bylaw in the first instance to find out if permission is required and if pets are considered in that scheme if that if permission is necessary then the person wanting the pet will need to make a written request to the body corporate and they'll need to make a decision at a meeting unfortunately there's no time frame on that in the legislation and it would be suggested that the person asking for the pet dictate what they need from the body corporate as in how long they have to obtain approval. Okay so in relation to the contravention notices is that a one way so I'm going to assume that is that the body corporate can issue that to an occupier or a tenant can an occupier or a tenant issue that contravention notice back to the body corporate? No the body corporate is the legal entity in which governs its own bylaws and enforces its own bylaws so they relate to individuals so a body corporate is the entity that enforces the bylaws against those individuals. Okay one of the questions just coming through is going to talk about is asking also a bit more about the pet side of it so I think we're actually talking about the question is about more about changing the bylaws to allow pets but we're going to talk about the changing process and we'll leave that one Christine. One of the other questions that's come up in relation to someone just wants clarification if possible about in Queensland it's not compulsory to use a body corporate manager that people can actually manage themselves. That's right the legislation set up for self-management it's optional to engage a body corporate manager so that's a decision at a general meeting. Okay fantastic well we might just keep moving on we will come back to some more questions so thank you very much for lodging them through. So this is where we are going to be talking about the changes to the bylaws so I can imagine this can be a lengthy process Christine but I could be wrong but if you could maybe just briefly explain how a bylaw can be amended or changed and who makes the suggestion or who makes the changes. Okay so what needs to happen for a bylaw to alter is a general meeting decision by special resolution to amend the community management statement to add amend or remove a bylaw that's currently in existence. This as I said general meeting so it needs to go to an annual general meeting or an extraordinary general meeting. The owners can submit their own motions occupiers can't submit their own motions but by all means they can make recommendations to the committee and the committee can also submit motions for consideration at the general meeting. There are restrictions on what a bylaw can do so it for example it can't restrict the type of residential use and it can't be oppressive and unreasonable. Once that general meeting decision has been made then the body corporate must register the new community management statement within three months at the title's registry. Okay so there's invalid bylaws as well so what would be an example Christine of someone wanting to change one of the bylaws and it would be one of those invalid ones? An example could be where it discriminates between the type of occupier so it might try to restrict the pool use only to owners as an example. Okay great all right we're just going to again thanks so much for the questions still coming through there's a lot that we will try and get through as much as we possibly can but Christine back over to you again Chris mentioned earlier in the interview about what the office does so I'll get you to summarize again maybe talk a little bit more about the dispute and the adjudication process. Sure so over to you. Okay so the office has two legislative obligations one is to provide the information service and the other is to provide a dispute resolution service. Now the information service provides information to all members of the public and we do so either via phone or in writing. To assist the public we also provide forms including contravention notice dispute resolution forms and even forms to update details with the body corporate. Other ways we provide information and education is through our website and seminars as well as a free online training course and as Chris mentioned we now have an online inquiry form. We do provide forms for dispute resolution and I'll talk about that process a bit later. So here we go dispute resolution so I just want to just be very clear that this is not the RTA's dispute resolution process under the tenancy laws this is the body corporate and community management commissioners office dispute service so again back over to you Christine to tell us about the dispute service that you offer. Okay so it provides dispute resolution which consists of conciliation and adjudication to owners occupiers and the body corporate and a couple of other entities involved in the body corporate. Now this is a low cost jurisdiction so there's a small application fee that must be lodged in accordance with the application form itself. There is a legislative requirement for each applicant to have attempted self resolution with the other party prior to lodging the application. If this isn't happened the commissioner may reject the application. Okay great so I would assume that you get quite a few disputes during the year do you Christine? Yes we do. We get approximately 1200 a year which is not huge compared to what RTA might see so the stats as of the end of May so far this year we've received 593 adjudication and 505 conciliation. Okay great so going back over to you saying that self resolution obviously the first step and then what happens then they're required to attempt conciliation it's a mandatory first step the applicant must complete the form in full and identify both the applicants and the respondents details as well as the secretary and body corporate managers details if they have one. There is a requirement to outline what those attempts at self resolution were and provide evidence as well as give a background to the dispute. It's a less formal process where the conciliator facilitates a discussion with an aim to resolve the dispute at hand. It's a good real agreement that's not enforceable and it cannot for anything said or done in conciliation cannot be used in another dispute process such as adjudication or through the courts. So conciliator must remain impartial and they don't act for either side so they're there to help facilitate a discussion and provide information to help those parties reach that agreement. Is the conciliation mainly done over the phone Christine or? It depends on the location of parties majority will be done by teleconference some do happen face to face. So then obviously then if something still not resolved we then have the adjudication process. That's right this is the more formal process again it requires the application of a form which is the form 15 and it must be completed in full so everything that was previously submitted with a conciliation application cannot be considered by an adjudicator it must be resubmitted with this form and the form must be in full. So again applicants name, name of scheme, respondent, body corporate managers, details, yourself resolution, a copy of your conciliation certificate as well as the grounds as to why you should get the audio seek. Okay and this process we know it's actually done on papers so what does that mean Christine? It means it's all on papers and there's no hearings as such so you don't get together with an adjudicator like you wouldn't have caught with a judge. It's all done on paper everything the applicant wants the adjudicator to consider must be submitted with their form as they need to make their own case. The order is issued by an adjudicator at the end of the process and that is enforceable and appealable. Okay so your website has a lot of information and it's great that it's actually been divided up into titles and all sections and things like that so I'll get you to step through some of the things that you have on your website Christine. Okay so our website is collated into topics so as you can see from the screen there are topics like roles and responsibilities meetings and bylaws so before you start searching the web page it's good to know exactly what you want to find out whether you want to know how to make a bylaw then head on to the bylaw section if you want to know about spending then you'd head to financial management. Okay and also to your new online inquiry. Yes so this came in in April so we've had a great uptake since then it is again another way to get general information we don't provide legal advice directions or rulings and we cannot interpret the laws for you so the regulation module is necessary in order for us to give specific relevant information and then you'll find drop-down boxes again it asks by topic so if you want to know who's responsible to maintain something then select maintenance and we will prompt you with some questions to get the relevant info. Great okay so all your information is available on the website so again the website qld.gov.au forward slash body corporate you've got a 1800 number as well interesting there's training assessment tool what is that for or more point who could actually access that so that's a free service that we provide now it was targeted towards committee members but any member of the public can access it they register online and they complete the units that are available at the end they'll get a certificate of completion so that's there for anybody to use so anyone in the general public so no matter whether you're a committee member or an occupier anybody could actually do anyone can use it that's all right um we have a lot of questions so I'm just going to get to the question side um one of the questions coming in Christine if you wouldn't mind putting up a rent sign or for sale signs on common areas such as defences and walls in the unit complexes do you need the body corporate permission first okay so again this is something that is generally covered in the bylaws for the scheme but any change to common areas will require permission okay so it it doesn't matter whether you're adding or removing something permission is always necessary for common areas from the committee okay um how do you get a unit owner and the body corporate to adhere to the bylaws when they don't do anything so I'm not sure what that might mean and maybe just clarify maybe the contravention notice process maybe that might be if there's a time frame for that okay so if a person identifies a contravention of a bylaw then they issue a form one to the committee the committee then have 14 days to advise the complainant whether or not they're going to enforce that bylaw based on the evidence given by the complainant if they're not satisfied then it's up to the complainant to either pursue it through our office or deal with it through uh with the actual alleged offender if the body corporate do enforce the bylaws then again they must sit in the notice the contravention notice to the offender and pursue it either through conciliation or the magistrates court okay one of the questions come in in relation to um with the dispute side of things do you go through the adjudication or QCAT are they the same no probably yeah just clarifying if it's a tenancy dispute situation you go through obviously dispute resolution and at the RTA and QCAT but if it's a body corporate dispute situation then it's going through your self-resolution dispute service at the body corporate commissioners office and the adjudication at the body corporate that's right so totally separate that side of things as well um there's a few questions coming through about the bulk electricity billing in a body corporate christina i'm going to give that to you okay so um as everyone will know that normally electricity or any utility service is the responsibility of the user to set up and pay for however body corporate can supply the service as long as they have the agreement of the user to for the user to be charged and reimburse the body corporate for that cost okay um so another one's coming in if the tenant continues to breach the bylaws even though you've issued a breach notice what can you do um well coming back to your the tenant side of things that would be repeated breaches so there's a part of our legislation that talks about if the tenant breaches the same breach for the same event or same situation in the 12 month period on the third occasion you can actually go directly off to the tribunal which is QCAT and seek a termination on order on the grounds of repeated breaches um but keep in mind that again is under that sort of process i don't think the body corporate have anything like repeated contravention no they only have to send one if it's not remedied then they can pursue it through conciliation or they can go to the magistrates court for a penalty to be imposed i've just seen one question to access the online training go to qld.gov.au forward slash body corporate training okay fantastic i am conscious of time i think we're sort of like very close to our time um one of the other questions up there we have excuse me with signage do we need the committee approval as well as the onsite manager onsite manager does not have any authority in the body corporate situation so you always need committee or general meeting decisions subject to what your bylaw says okay and just a quick one just coming through because the list of questions quite large how do i amend the bylaws for air conditioning and now i'm not sure whether that's actually adding an air conditioning unit or if it's amending an existing bylaw it's the process we discussed earlier about a general meeting decision by special resolution to amend the community management statement which is ultimately ultimately going to amend that bylaw okay great but we do have still a lot of questions in i'm sorry that we cannot answer everybody's questions there's questions on smoking car park visitors uh cars and car parks um for uh delegated for visitors we will try and see what we can actually deal directly with some of these questions um and i do really appreciate your time it's just unfortunately we um have a lot of questions that we just can't get to so i'd like to sort of like go back to christen say thank you so much for coming in and joining us this morning thank you what we might need to do is maybe another webinar and maybe just deal with a lot of all the questions that we have coming through which is obviously a lot happy to do that um we will actually have a copy of this webinar available on our website probably just in the next week or so um it will be available so please those people who are asking for a copy of our slides or not that a copy of the actual webinar will be available and as i said we will try and see if we can get to some of the questions that have been submitted as well if not we might run a second webinar and just deal with all the questions that's coming if that's all right christine that's fine you're welcome to come back and join us again happy to do so great thank you everybody for your attendance um the webinar will end now we do have a survey that will pop up shortly on your screen we'd love for you to um complete it it gives us a gives you an opportunity to tell us about any topics that you would like to know more about so thank you everybody for joining us today