[Mary Klower]

My Council wants to investigate if we should be putting a charge on to ratepayers accounts for processing a Notice of Sale (excluding transfers from one spouse to another). This is currently already being done in Queensland and the legislation in Queensland states that a fee may be charged for recording a change of ownership of land however our legislation is silent on this matter.
We have had a legal opinion which has stated that yes we can charge a fee but interested if anyone alreadys does this. We may not go down this track just testing the waters.
Thanks
Mary

[Andrew Butcher]

Hi Mary
I am interested in this topic but dare say we would not be prepared to go down this path just yet.
A more significant overhead for us is in providing copies of past notices and transaction listings for taxation purposes or as evidence of ownership for re-financing.
I am working on our finance manager to try and charge but it wont be for 2017-18.
Good luck.
Regards,
Andrew

[Mary Klower]

Thanks Andrew, Yes we are also commencing a fee for providing copies of notices from 1 July, however current and prior year will not be included.
Mary

[Trevor Holland]

Howdy Mary
We already charge for copies of rate notices for preceding years, especially where we are required to go back for a number of years. Generally we receive the request. Notify the customer of what the estimated charge will be and get them to pay by credit card over the phone once the search is complete. We don’t get that many requests so it is not a great problem.
I know we have spoken on the subject of charging for changing ownership details before.
Given that the legislation is silent than yes I agree it may be possible to raise this charge. However unlike Queensland NSW does not have this legislation in place. So am I correct in assuming that the charge is going to be subject to GST?
If the charge is subject to GST then it couldn’t be included on the rate notice. It would need to have a debtor account raised and sent out with recovery taken if not paid.
Hope this helps.
Trevor

[David Grima]

Hi there,
We at Rockdale (and at Bayside from 1st July) charge $10 per year up to a maximum charge of $100.
We also do not charge for the current or previous year.
With regards to charging to update your records – I know it has been discussed before but I could not justify charging a ratepayer a fee of any sort to update our records so that we can send them a rate notice.
How will you justify that?
If I were a ratepayer I would be pretty p’d off if that happened to me.
Dave

[Jason Symons]

Morning all,
At Strathfield we currently charge $30 per property enquiry. From 2017/2018 we will be charging $20 for each copy of a rate/instalment notice, and $30 for a State of Account. If someone asks for a copy of a notice so they can pay overdue rates we will generally waive the fee.
Jason

[Susan Scott]

Our Council charges $15.00 for a notice reprint & $15.00 Transaction Listing fee.
I can’t see how one could justify charging a fee for transfer of ownership; surely it is a function of Council to keep a record of the ownership of a property for rating purposes, whereas providing copies of information that a ratepayer has already received, in the case of a notice, or where they reasonably ought to have kept their own records, in the case of payments, are an additional service.

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