Trading Exclusive Use Agreements

Back in the heyday of my youth, when Donkey Kong was cutting edge gaming, we used to spend our lunch breaks playing with Kiss (the American glam metal band) cards. The cards were only available in Donruss bubble-gum packets, which proved a challenging acquisition for a metal-mouthed yours truly who was forbidden from indulging in their sugary goodness. Somehow, a friend must have been gullible kind enough to lend me some of his cards to enable me to partake in my first game of “tops”.

To the uninitiated, tops might appear to be a game of pure chance – two players take turns in throwing one card at a time on the ground in front of them and when a player’s card lands on top of any part of another card, that player wins all the cards – but to me, it was a game of endurance, strategy and skill. Before too long I had accumulated more than 1000 cards. When we weren’t playing tops we’d be trading. Somehow, I never managed to get the whole set… you might say I was a couple of Kiss cards short of a pack.

Swapping exclusive use spaces is almost as easy as trading Kiss cards. Let’s say Gene is permanently disqualified from driving a vehicle and needs more storage space for his boot collection, whereas Ace desires additional parking space to operate the gullwing doors on his Lamborghini more freely (see what I did there?) and is desperate to relinquish his storage space as a consequence of his worsening obsessive-compulsive spartanism… and so they agree Gene will trade his exclusive use car space for Ace’s exclusive use storage space.

To progress the swapsies, all they need to do is:

1. enter into a written agreement – on the back of a Kiss card would suffice;
2. request the committee to formalise the swap by approving a new community management statement; and
3. record the new community management statement at the titles office (within 3 months of the date of the agreement between Gene and Ace).

In the profound words of Paul Stanley… It’s easy as it seems ‘cause it’s easy as it seems.

This Article was contributed by Andrew Suttie from Nicholsons Solicitors