Well it's been quite some time since I posted on this thread - and for good reason. I have not posted about the ongoing dramas as no one could have solved my problem except myself.
I am understanding more and more why developing is not for most people. Plenty of hurdles to jump over and the one I came across came out of the blue while I was away for a long weekend in the Blue Mts.
Some history. As I reported at the beginning of this thread, a friend of mine was also building a kit home duplex in the same town. He was a few weeks ahead of me and completed his house before me. He also had a contract in place for the sale of house 1 and had submitted a "development contract" to council which accompanied his strata subdivision plans. All was progressing slowly but smoothly through council and his application was approved and a Strata subdivision certificate was issued by council. They also signed the strata administration sheet which was to be sent to Land Titles Office. My application, at this stage, had also been lodged with council but was some weeks behind. So once my friends' documents had been approved he had to then send them to the bank to be signed in order to release the original title to enable the strata subdivision to be registered at LTO. This all takes time - especially as it was a Macquarie funded loan. After a couple of weeks he had everything he required to send off to LTO and his solicitor lodged the subdivision application through an agent. Anyway I received a call from my surveyor while I was holidaying and the news was quite a shock - it was actually news about my friends lodgement as we use the same surveyor. The LTO had rejected his application! They told him that council had misinterpreted the subdivision laws and had wrongly made him (and me of course) go through the lengthy and costly process of creating a Strata Development Contract which was unacceptable to LTO.
Sooo.. of course, according to council, LTO had been allowing these to be processed in the past so it wasn't their problem!
Here we had both council and LTO shirking responsibility with my friend, me and, apparantly, 10 other applicants in the council system in no mans land.
Well, that was around 24th Sept. Fast forward to now and we have just managed to, after much negotiating, a section 96 and an 88b, get the revised plans (without a development contract) ready for lodgement to LTO. I will give out the info in another post about how it was solved if anyone is interested.
The good news is now we are around 3 weeks away from getting this subdivision registered so we can settle on the first house and throw some money at the 2nd house to get it built. All of this business is also holding up the purchase of our next block of land which is subject to the settlement of House 1.
