Council refuses planning permit for a swimming pool - breaches covenant

What do you do when your local council refuses you a swimming pool permit because it would breach a registered restrictive covenant? Perhaps have the local council weasel arrested by the Police for making another stupid decision. What options do you have? You could make application to the Supreme Court to have the covenant removed or amended. This could cost you $15000 to $25000, a lot of time and with no guarantee that you would still succeed. Or as one punter did, he appealed the Council's decision to refuse to grant the Permit and took his case to VCAT. In fact the Tribunal member decided this one on the spot. He too obviously can recognise stupid decisions when he sees one. Anecdotally I have been hearing a number of people affected by similar restrictive covenants been refused permits for a swimming pool.

The restrictive coveant in question is quite common in the sandbelt areas of bayside Melbourne and were placed on title by developers in the 1920s to 1950s which was the era before planning schemes were adopted. A typical covenant will read
Will not excavate carry away or remove or permit to be excavated carried away or removed from the land hereby transferred any earth clay stone gravel or sand except for the purpose of excavating for the foundations of any buildings to be erected thereon or use or permit or allow the said land to be used for the manufacture or winning of bricks tiles or pottery ware.

Such covenants evolved to preserve an aesthetic standard and I could not ever think any covenant was meant to restrict the construction of a swimming pool.

Impact of Allens Conveyancing Review & Electronic Conveyancing

If I can interpret Recommendation 1 of the Allens Conveyancing Review Report and the Government's response, the State Government will be looking into ways of making electronic settlements de rigeur with an appropriate regulatory framework.
If I can suggest the main way forward for the conveyancing industry:

• regulation of conveyancers to ensure compulsory insurance and minimum qualifications
  
• putting a sunset clause on using paper based systems, say 5 years


• significant price differential on registration fees of transfers, say 50%

The report touched on this and the government has indicated calling for a Business Impact Assessment to look into these issues. This way competetion, efficiencies and cost savings to the public will prevail.

Government response to Allens Report

EC - Land Registry expects 80% uptake

Land Registry believes that over a period of a couple of years EC could represent up to 80 per cent of all settlements. Title transfers will still be allowed to be processed using the current paper-based conveyancing processes.
No physical settlement will occur in the EC system; with settlement, lodgement and notification of transaction details to relevant statutory authorities occurring electronically, in one continuous consecutive combination.
While the EC system will run in parallel with the paper-based lodgement processes, the survey conducted for this review identified a strong likelihood that the EC system will be supported by suppliers of conveyancing services (see figure 2.1). Land Victoria suggests that about 20 per cent of conveyancing will still be done using the paper system.

Final Report - Regulation of Conveyancing Services in Victoria

for-sale-by-owners property web site

MADISON, Wisconsin. - Across the country, the National Association of Realtors and the 6 percent commission that most of its members charge to sell a house are under assault by government officials, consumer advocates, lawyers and ambitious entrepreneurs. But the most effective challenge so far emanates from a spare bedroom in the modest home here of Christie Miller.
Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country.
They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts. Their site, FsboMadison.com (pronounced FIZZ-boh) holds a nearly 20 percent share of the Dane County market for residential real estate listings.

To real estate agents, "for sale by owner" conjures up some cranky tightwad trying to sell an overpriced, ramshackle house. Agents utter FSBO as if there was something foul stuck to the bottom of their shoe. "It's a commission-avoidance scheme," said Sheridan Glen, manager of the downtown Madison office for Wisconsin's biggest real estate broker, the First Weber Group.
Mr. Glen ticks off the tasks that real estate agents handle: using market expertise to price a house; advertising and showing it; negotiating an offer; organizing the paperwork for closing. "We do a good job," he said. "We deserve 6 or 7 percent."

New York Times

The website has very little design aesthetic - but just consider the impact of the concept.
Will this ever take off in Australia? A major difference is Australian agents dont charge 6% more likely to be in a range of 1 - 3%
Another twist is I believe a local Melbourne Agent is toying with the idea of delegating the Open For Inspections direct to the client.

realestate.com.au

November was a record month for realestate.com.au. The number of Australian agents using realestate.com.au or realcommercial.com.au increased to 7013 (an estimated 83% of the market), monthly visitors to realestate.com.au increased to 2.36m

More than 350,000 properties are marketed for sale and for rent on the site each month

ASX company announcement 23 Dec 2005

It cant be that far off before it hits close to 100%. For example, if you want to rent a property in Brighton or Sandringham (Melbourne) the Age has a handful of classified listings (that's basically zero support from the local estate agents)

The Age property liftout each weekend is a pretty slim publication. Quite compact really.