Advice needed: Apartment carspace dilemma

ondafly

Hi folks,

Bit of advice needed here, even though I konw I am partly in the wrong, and not sure if I have a leg to stand on legally !

We live in an apartment complex with an underground carpark (we own our apartment). There are 2 rules displayed as you enter the carpark;

1)One car space is allocated for each apartment (it doesn't mention how many cars per space)
2)Please park in the allocated white lines (some of the directors actually park in spaces, that are not matched to their apartment)

There are also a number of Visitor carspaces, 5 in total. Now as you can imagine, this carpark is not layed out exactly. Some car spaces are bigger than others. Ours in fact, fits 2 cars without obstruction to anyone, and I've made it my business to get to know those who park around us (2 directors of the mangement company), no one has ever had a problem, except for 1 oldish gentleman, who found it difficult to get past our cars (he was driving some huge 4x4). I was told this (at start of January) by one of the Directors. I explained to him, that I would be leaving my cars parked that way, and that we never abuse the visitors carspaces, he personally had no problem with it, and mentioned to me to look out for clampers. If I see clampers to ask them are they targetting my car etc etc.. We've been parking our cars like this now since last July 04, and previous owners did the same thing.

There are 3 other couples like ourselves (own 2 cars) in the complex, who park one car in their car space, and the remaining car in the visitor space and there are the remaining groups of renters, who in some cases have 3 cars per apartment. As you can imagine, its a bit of a lottery for people to get a space in the visitor carspots, and plenty of the time, a car will be parked in a visitor spot for weeks on end, and never moved. On many ocassions, I've had friends and family having to park down the road due to the lack of space.

To the root of the problem ! This Friday, I have found out, cars will be having notices put on them and possibly clamped for abusing the visitor car spaces. My concern here is of our cars. We drive to work in one of the cars each day (we rotate), so during the day, there is only ever 1 car present. Problem being, we park our cars sideways in the space, as opposed to driving into it. Should I make an effort this Friday to park the cars more "correctly" ? or just leave it and see what happens.

Final thought - if you own an apartment, and the election to be a director becomes available - Do it ! I probably would have a clearer understanding of the situation if I hadn't worked late, the night of the Complex's AGM last January, and managed to get myself elected as a director.

Victor

It sounds like you have a dodgy set of rules and stupid lines. Get the rules formalised and the parking spaces numbered the same way (and sequence if practical, there may be specific reasons to put some out of sequence) as the apartments. How do your title documents define your space or is it merely "a space" or "a space for a car".

ondafly

I haven't a copy of the deeds to hand, its possibly still with my solicitor, although i do know the land registry can take their time regarding "stamping them" and getting them back to him.

I think I'll just park one of the cars properly tomorrow morning, and take the other one with us in the morning.

In reality the rules are unclear, perhaps on purpose. What if I owned 3 motorbikes, surely I could park all 3 in the carspace - or better yet 2 Smart cars. I guess a notice will be sent around tomorrow evening, and hopefully I'll bump into one of the directors in the meantime and have a chat.