On the evening of Wednesday 16 March, we passed the Second Reading of the Unit Titles Amendment Bill.
It was my first time giving a speech via Zoom Parliament, acknowledging the bill’s sponsor Nicola Willis (and forebear, Hon. Nikki Kaye) and the work we’ve got to do to fix some odd things that happened in Select Committee.
There was a beautiful irony in offering my contribution from isolation as a household contact from my own apartment (a stone’s throw from Ponsonby Road) in Auckland Central.
In the same way that I’d had incredible good fortune to collaborate with the Body Corporate Chairs Group (shout out, especially, to the sharp mind of Tim Jones) and the City Centre Residents’ Group on apartment isolation guidance, we had also collaborated each step of the way on this Unit Titles Amendment.
For the uninitiated, the Unit Titles Act 2010 sets the ground rules for how those in multi-unit housing, adjoined townhouses and apartments run their body corporates, from maintenance of shared areas, through financial reporting, investment, insurance and operational rules. It’s long overdue for amendment, not the least because of how times have changed.
Back in 2010, those denser living arrangements made up around 15% of new homes, in 2017 they made up 40%, in January 2022 alone, Unit Titles made up nearly half of all new consented dwellings across Aotearoa New Zealand.
We’ve all heard our share of horror stories when it comes to large scale apartments, both historical and new developments.
The leaky homes crisis of the early 2000s prompted some disconnected, ham-fisted responses, including changes by many commercial banks to put in place policy that refused to lend on smaller apartments without significantly higher proportional deposits.
This was, of course, without any evidence that smaller apartments were in any way more or less likely to be afflicted with issues than their neighbours.
I was stoked to have worked with the Bankers’ Association to in turn directly address a number of banks who, last year, finally changed these archaic policies.
Heritage buildings, on the other hand, have had their own bad press run with asbestos concerns and fire hazards woes. The only way to ever ‘fix’ these problems is full disclosure in working out how you can deal with them.
That’s not even touching the far greater concerns seen in proxy farming. This is where one group, or individuals, do their darnedest to collect as many votes as possible to force their will on everybody else in the building/s.
I've been privy to countless reports of, effectively, corporate takeovers, where owner-occupiers have been plunged into debt by egregious costs forced on them as a result of entities who capture enough of the votes to require excessive work in common areas in order to split the bill and flip their property for more money.
It's particularly dangerous in instances of absentee landlords, where profit maximisation focuses result in cuts to amenities, security, and upkeep for everybody else in the building, at their worst causing issues for the broader community.
The other key issue is of pre-contractual and pre-settlement disclosure, providing accessible and straight-forward information at the right time and without hassle to enable smooth sale with shared knowledge from all parties.
At Select Committee the majority (Labour, National and ACT members) voted to remove proxy voting limits and – by decree of many lawyers and conveyancers – make the disclosures regime extremely, overly complicated.
I was the sole dissenting voice and registered these concerns (along with the unnecessary removal of professional industry membership for body corporate managers) in the report that is now available on Parliament’s website.
Subsequent to Select Committee processes and a bit of correspondence and several meetings, I’ve been delighted that sponsoring member Nicola Willis has agreed these unworkable changes must be remedied. Between us and the Associate Minister of Housing, we’re confident we’ll see some Supplementary Order Papers up at the Committee of the Whole House reading of the Bill in the next few weeks to fix these problems.
After that, we’ll see these well-overdue modernising legal changes in effect by the end of the year. Something to write home about. (Chlöe Swarbrick)
Chlöe Swarbrick, T: 09 378 4810, E: chloe.swarbrick@parliament.govt.nz
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