A Strata Boxing Day Sales Guide

or, bargain hunting for your strata building …

[5:00 minutes estimated reading time, with 963 words]

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On Boxing Day we rush madly to buy everything we did [and didn’t know] we needed at bargain prices.

It’s hard to resist those bargains, there’s not a lot to do otherwise and what are we going to do with that leftover money anyway?

So, what’s Boxing Day all about and what should strata buyers do?

A BIT OF BOXING DAY HISTORY

What is Boxing Day actually for and how did it come about?

My research suggests that no one actually knows. But a few theories exist as follows [and these are real].

• It’s a simple charitable tradition of giving money and other gifts to those who are needy and in service positions … usually in boxes.

• It is named after Mr Boxing, a Golden Gloves winner in his teens who later turned politician and who tragically died in a horse and carriage accident.

• Boxing Day evolved from the traditional practice of placing metal boxes outside churches to collect special offerings tied to the Feast of Saint Stephen.

• It’s a continuation of a nineteenth-century Victorian custom for tradesmen to collect their ‘Christmas boxes’ or gifts on the day after Christmas in return for good and reliable service throughout the year.

• It’s an old English tradition that in exchange for ensuring that wealthy landowners' Christmas ran smoothly, their servants were allowed to take the 26th off to visit their families. The landowners also gave each servant a box containing gifts and bonuses (and sometimes leftover food).

• Boxing Day is a secular adaptation of the religious practice, from the 1800s, when churches opened their alms boxes (boxes where people place monetary donations) and distributed the contents to the poor.

These days it's all about shopping with sales starting early in the morning and crowds pushing at shopfronts to get in and grab a bargain.

SOME STRATA BARGAINS

So what bargains can savvy strata shoppers get at the strata clearance sales in 2023? 

Here are 7 strata bargain ideas that might tempt you [with my warnings].

1.     They could probably find some recycled and [very] old by-laws or rules being sold cheaply [or an a DIY basis] by a range of new and old strata law firms.  That’s way cheaper than actually getting a by-law or rule considered, structured, and drafted properly by experienced people to properly suit your strata building. 

Cheap legal work is always tempting, even if it doesn’t always work out.

2.     There's more than a few strata managers around the country offering low [or very low] management fees to get appointed.  In some places, strata managers are even offering free services for the first few months.

That’s a popular area to save strata money even if you sign up for multiple years, there are a lot of extra charges, and it’s not entirely clear what commissions are being paid.

3.     A strata building developer or builder [or the NSW Building Commissioner these days] might offer a quick settlement of your building defects claim if you're prepared to accept their hard bargain, take a discount or let them come back to do the repairs themselves.  Some of them even prepared the free [but valueless] agreement to extend statutory warranties so the strata building waits whilst time limits expire.

Since it’s been exhausting and costly to run the defects claim, settlement is often attractive and popular, and you can worry about new and latent defects that pop up next year.

4.     Or, what about negotiating limited cover and higher excesses to try to reduce the ever increasing insurance premium.  And, whilst you’re at it why not let your strata manager get you a deal on that insurance premium from one or other of the companies that pays them commissions [fully disclosed of course].

There won’t be that many claims anyway, will there?

5.     There’s also plenty of deals out there on cheaper compliance reports for things like sinking or capital funding forecasts, financial audits, or Work Health & Safety reports. 

After all, why pay top prices for high quality and detailed reports for you building when they’ll only tell you about all the problems, require you to do more and spend more, and, you’ll have to try to find a way to ignore them?

6.     If you’re a strata owner, you could pay your strata levies early and get a discount [if your strata building was so generous as to increase the levies for everyone to offer a discount to a few] so that the other strata owners subsidise you a bit.

Hopefully, though you’re not the late paying strata owner who isn’t just subsidising the early pay discounts but paying another 10% interest as well.

7.     Finally, you can always find an even cheaper cleaner, gardener, plumber, electrician, etc for the strata building since you’re an investor or don’t care about that, you’ll be selling next year anyway, and who cares if the contractors don’t pay award wages.

CONCLUSIONS

I suppose strata shopping is just like all bargain hunting.

You could easily end up buying something that you didn’t really need, that doesn't quite fit or suit you, or just won’t last as long as you needed it to: even though you saved a bit of money and felt good at the time.

So, make sure that when you are strata shopping {whether on Boxing Day or not} that you and your strata building buy what it actually needs and wants, that it suits your requirements, and, that you buy the best quality you can afford within your budget.

See you at the strata sales and hands off those super cheap low voltage LED lights ... they're mine!

December 26, 2023

Francesco ...