Hi
This is my first post. My wife and I recently signed a contract to buy a 1-bedroom apartment off the plan in a 130+ apartment development in the City of Sydney council area. In our discussions with the sales agent we were offered the option of purchasing a "car parking space" with the apartment for an additional $60,000, which we decided to do. We paid a holding deposit on the apartment, but when our conveyancer saw the contract, she noticed that our "car space" was described as a "storage space", with a minimum area of 12.5 square metres. I queried this with the Sydney Council, and the first person I spoke to assured me that there was no reason we couldn't use a "storage space" to "store" a car, and that there wasn't any advantage to the developer in having this space described as a storage space. So with this assurance, and after further conversations with the sales agent and our conveyancer, we went ahead and exchanged contracts late last week. The development is expected to be completed in May or June 2014.
Today I received a call from someone else in the Sydney Council's Town Planning area, who was belatedly replying to an email query I had lodged a week or so before signing the contract. He told a very different story: if the space is designated as a storage space on the approved DA and subsequently on the registered strata plan, then under no circumstances will we be allowed to use that space to house a car.
I then contacted the developer's agent again, and had a conversation with the director of the company to try and clarify when the "storage space" would be redesignated as a car space. He explained that it would not be, and that it would be perfectly legal for us to use the space to park a car if we chose to, once the final strata plan was registered. He said that the Council would have no interest in how these spaces were actually used, as long as they were designated in accordance with the planning regulations (which apparently place limits on the numbers of car spaces you can have for developments of a given size).
Has anyone else had experience of anything like this? I'm assuming that we don't have any legal recourse to rescind the contract or renegotiate the sale price (given that the wording of the contract is in terms of a "storage space"). But I'd be interested to know if anyone can suggest any ways of approaching this. Should we report the developer to the Council, to test whether they do in fact turn a blind eye to this sort of practice? If we don't do that, will we be complicit in the developer's strategy for bypassing council regulations about car parking, and therefore legally vulnerable ourselves? We also may run into trouble if/when we want to sell the apartment.
Many thanks for any suggestions or advice.
This is my first post. My wife and I recently signed a contract to buy a 1-bedroom apartment off the plan in a 130+ apartment development in the City of Sydney council area. In our discussions with the sales agent we were offered the option of purchasing a "car parking space" with the apartment for an additional $60,000, which we decided to do. We paid a holding deposit on the apartment, but when our conveyancer saw the contract, she noticed that our "car space" was described as a "storage space", with a minimum area of 12.5 square metres. I queried this with the Sydney Council, and the first person I spoke to assured me that there was no reason we couldn't use a "storage space" to "store" a car, and that there wasn't any advantage to the developer in having this space described as a storage space. So with this assurance, and after further conversations with the sales agent and our conveyancer, we went ahead and exchanged contracts late last week. The development is expected to be completed in May or June 2014.
Today I received a call from someone else in the Sydney Council's Town Planning area, who was belatedly replying to an email query I had lodged a week or so before signing the contract. He told a very different story: if the space is designated as a storage space on the approved DA and subsequently on the registered strata plan, then under no circumstances will we be allowed to use that space to house a car.
I then contacted the developer's agent again, and had a conversation with the director of the company to try and clarify when the "storage space" would be redesignated as a car space. He explained that it would not be, and that it would be perfectly legal for us to use the space to park a car if we chose to, once the final strata plan was registered. He said that the Council would have no interest in how these spaces were actually used, as long as they were designated in accordance with the planning regulations (which apparently place limits on the numbers of car spaces you can have for developments of a given size).
Has anyone else had experience of anything like this? I'm assuming that we don't have any legal recourse to rescind the contract or renegotiate the sale price (given that the wording of the contract is in terms of a "storage space"). But I'd be interested to know if anyone can suggest any ways of approaching this. Should we report the developer to the Council, to test whether they do in fact turn a blind eye to this sort of practice? If we don't do that, will we be complicit in the developer's strategy for bypassing council regulations about car parking, and therefore legally vulnerable ourselves? We also may run into trouble if/when we want to sell the apartment.
Many thanks for any suggestions or advice.