Getting Down Into the Carpet Piles
The Owners - Strata Plan 99960 v SPS Building Contractors Pty Ltd [2024] NSWSC 687
GoStrata’s CaseWatch is a short, sharp and easy-to-understand review of important and interesting Court and Tribunal decisions affecting Australian strata title stakeholders.
Quick Read
This 2024 NSW Supreme Court case is about a dispute in a Tweed Heads residential strata title building about Home Building Act 1989 statutory warranty building defects in balcony waterproofing, sliding doors, rainwater tanks and vapour barriers. But the strata building and builder disagreed about some defects, whether they were systemic and required repair works. So, key issues were identifying if the defects were systemic, and if the defects and/or the repairs were to common property or to strata lot property and there therefore claimable by the strata building. After considering the strata title laws and previous decisions the NSW Supreme Court said that the disputed defects were not systemic, that damage to strata lot property resulting from defect repair works were compensable, that defects in strata lot property were not claimable by the strata building, and that the carpets in the strata lots were common property. So, whilst this is just another strata building defect claim about systemic defects and repair works, the parts of the decision about carpets in strata lots being common property and not lot property is new and changes strata stakeholder conventions dramatically.
Implications
The key implications of this strata case are as follows.
Strata buildings can claim damages for the cost of rectifying defective building work done in breach of the Home Building Act 1989 statutory warranties.
Strata buildings can recover damages for defective common property but not for defective strata lot property.
Repairs to strata lot property resulting from repairing common property defects are claimable as consequential work and because of s.122 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 obligations.
So some things in strata lots like carpets and rainwater tanks can be repaired or replaced as part of strata building defect claims.
Carpets that in strata lots at the date of strata plan registration are claimable common property for a few reasons.