Tag: Australian committee members

The Strata Manager’s Role: Does it require professional qualifications?

By Mary R.

This is not expert insurance, legal or financial advice. It is a suggested guide based on publicly available information in government and industry documents. Circumstances and legislation vary between Australian States and Territories, so committees should check the current requirements applying to their own strata building and obtain professional advice where appropriate. For this particular blog I am allowing useful input in comments. It should be general Australian insurance information only. This blog is independent and fully self-funded.

 

If you’ve just joined your first strata committee, there are two questions worth contemplating for a few minutes. The answers may affect how much you can rely on your manager’s advice and whether you can just accept it. Let’s start by tackling the first question.

Question One: Is a strata manager an administrator or a professional?

There two ways of looking at the strata manager’s role:

Administrator
An administrator generally:

    1. Carries out decisions made by someone else – typically in our case the committee – within the authority given to them by legislation or their service contract, which may allocate some decision-making tasks.
    2. Performs administrative functions such as processing payments, keeping records, issuing notices, circulating minutes, answering correspondence and arranging and/or attending meetings. Much of this work is repetitive and increasingly capable of being assisted by specialist software and AI.
    3. Does not necessarily need the body of specialised knowledge, formal education and supervised practical experience traditionally associated with a profession.
    4. In terms of amateur versus professional, are they also professional because they earn income for their work, similar to the difference between amateur and professional sportspeople?
    5. Admin officers and assistants are expected to act at all times in a professional manner, including with intergrity, reliability and in the best interests of their clients.

Professional
A professional, on the other hand:

    1. Exercises independent judgement and expertise that the client relies upon precisely because the service provider has both experience and a relevant tertiary qualification.
    2. Works within a body of specialised knowledge that has been stringently tested all the way through to recognised qualification levels.
    3. May be subject to higher professional standards and accountability through a regulatory or professional body with the ability to register and sanction its members.
    4. Spends a lot of their own time updating their knowledge and skills through various available avenues. Their knowledge base must always be current.

The Qld Government, on its web site is clear about it: a body corporate manager is engaged to provide administrative services to the body corporate. And this is the part that may surprise new committee members: there is currently no formal training or qualification of any kind required to do the job in Queensland. (Qld Govt)

Thus the Queensland description of a body corporate manager appears to fit the basic administrator model: the manager is there to provide administrative services and to carry out the body corporate’s decisions with integrity and efficiency, all of which does not require tertiary-level education.

But that is not necessarily how the role works in practice. Strata managers everywhere, not just in Queensland, routinely provide advice about legislation, contracts, insurance, disputes and the proper way for a committee to proceed. Committee members often rely on that advice because they don’t have the necessary specialist knowledge themselves.

And therein lies the problem.

If the manager is only an administrator, then the committee is often the one exercising the judgement and making the decisions. But what happens when the committee does not have the knowledge necessary to make that judgement? Someone must fill the gap. That someone is often the manager.

That doesn’t necessarily make the manager a professional in the formal sense. But it does mean that a role that is labelled administrative can also be performing functions that committees assume is carried out to professional standards.

And now for the second question.

Question 2: Should there be a minimum qualification standard before someone is entrusted with other people’s money and legal obligations?

The person your committee may rely on to interpret legislation, negotiate contracts, deal with disputes and manage funds may have entered the role with no more formal preparation than you had when you accepted your volunteer position.

Perhaps not even that. Some new committee members receive a “welcome” information pack or USB stick from the outgoing committee. It will usually contain, among other things, a clear outline of duties and how to provide good governance for your building, as well as other related topics.

I don’t think the answer here is particularly difficult. It is an argument about basic consumer protection.

Queensland currently sets no formal qualification bar but many strata managers pursue it themselves.

New South Wales is working towards requiring that to be classed as a strata manager after the preliminary “apprenticeship” period, the full Certificate IV in Strata Management is required.

Victoria has currently taken a middle-ground approach, but its requirement is only for part of the above Certificate IV – five units rather than the 18-unit full qualification expected in other jurisdictions. It won’t necessarily provide the level of knowledge that a committee needs.

So, Question One: administrator or professional – what is my answer?
I’m happy to leave that question open. It is a reasonable question, and there are arguments on both sides but titles alone don’t dictate the levels of competence.

I don’t think the question can be resolved simply by looking at the job description. The same day-to-day role can be viewed either way, and different states and territories have taken different approaches. The situation is considerably more complicated than simply saying that some states regulate managers more than others.

But I find the second question much harder to leave open.

So, Question Two: Should there be a minimum tertiary-level qualifications and training standards for strata managers?
In my view, the answer is yes. Queensland should have them, while New South Wales and other states already have them, will have them, or are reviewing their options. Victoria currently has a half-hearted approach, possibly still under review, which fails to provide committees with enough protection to trust their strata manager’s guidance and advice unequivocally. This is where Victoria, while intending to increase the level of trust that committees can place in their strata managers, must avoid ending up with a regulation that is riskier for committees if that increased level of trust is misplaced.

So you’ve joined a strata committee. What does that mean?

By Mary R.

Melbourne city skyline with illuminated buildings and a river bridge at dusk

 

This is not expert legal or financial advice. It is a suggested guide based on publicly available information in government and industry documents. Circumstances and legislation vary between Australian States and Territories, so committees should check the current requirements applying to their own strata building and obtain professional advice where appropriate. This blog is independent and fully self-funded.

 

Most people don’t join a strata committee expecting drama or complexity. It usually starts quite simply. Someone at an Annual General Meeting (AGM) says they’ll nominate you, or you put your hand up because it seems like a reasonable way to contribute. to the overall wellbeing of your building’s residents.

Then, a few weeks later, you start receiving emails from a strata manager, and a portal login arrives in your inbox. Suddenly you’re expected to be part of the decision-making structure for a building that often represents significant shared property value and long-term financial commitments.

At that point, many new committee members ask themselves the same question: what exactly am I responsible for here?

The simplest way to understand it is this. The committee is not there to “run” the building in a hands-on operational sense. It is there to oversee and make decisions about how the building is managed on behalf of all owners. That distinction may sound subtle, but it shapes almost everything that follows.

The owners corporation is the legal entity that owns the common property and ultimately makes decisions affecting it, while delegating many day-to-day and operational decisions to an elected committee and, in most cases, to a strata manager acting within that framework.

Because it is not practical for dozens or hundreds of owners to make those decisions, the committee acts on behalf of the owners corporation between AGMs, within the limits set by legislation and any resolutions passed at those meetings.

A small group of volunteers may now find themselves dealing with budgets, maintenance decisions, contractor issues, insurance policy renewals, and correspondence that often requires a prompt response to quite detailed questions.

Most of this work arrives through a strata manager, usually via email or an online portal. Increasingly, strata management firms now use software platforms that organise everything into workflows. Maintenance requests may be logged as tickets and correspondence may be generated using templates. Financial records are often presented through ‘dashboards’ that summarise information in charts, tables and reports. These are then published in the committee’s online portal for their inspection.

This can improve efficiency and consistency, but it can also change how information is experienced by committee members. Instead of receiving a narrative explanation from a manager, you may receive structured summaries or system-generated updates. You might see statements such as “appropriate action was taken,” without detailed context of the underlying issue.

This reflects a possible combination of privacy obligations and the need to be seen as consistent with tenants and owner occupiers. For new committee members, it can sometimes feel distant, as though they are being informed about decisions, rather than directly involved in shaping them.

This perception leads to one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of committee work. You are not simply there to approve all-but-finalised recommendations. Rather, your role is to ask questions and decide whether decisions being put forward are appropriate within the committee’s authority.

That may include reviewing financial statements, invoices, quotations, receipts, or documentation relating to maintenance works. The level of detail varies from building to building and job lot to job lot, but informed oversight is a central part of the role.

For this reason, sharing responsibilities among committee members can be valuable, particularly given the time and detail involved. It also helps explain why many committees include retirees or people with flexible time availability, although there is no single typical profile.

For most committee members the learning curve is largely about knowing where information come from, what assumptions and industry-wide conventions sit behind budget items, what information has been missing from maintenance proposals, and how and why some contractors are preferred to others.

These are not technical questions. They are governance questions, and they are at the heart of the committee’s role.

Strata governance in Australia operates in a hybrid space. It is not a corporate board structure, but it is also not informal. It combines volunteer decision-making with paid management services, and increasingly sophisticated software systems. That combination can work effectively provided that committees remains actively engaged with the information being presented. Just because a procedure has been carried out repeatedly in the past does not mean that it should be assumed to be correct.

Keep in mind, too, that strata Acts are regularly updated and amended. Regulations can and do change.

To recap: if you take nothing else from your first experience on a committee, it is this: your role is not to do everything. It is to ensure that decisions, budgets and proposals put before you are properly reviewed. Once that becomes clear, the role often feels less overwhelming – and more meaningful.

In my next blog I will discuss misconceptions about who is actually managing strata buildings in Australia and why.

 

This blog is fully independent and self-funded. It doesn’t offer legal or financial advice. When such advice is needed, always consult a professional in those disciplines. Use the links provided here as a starting point. The author resided in Victoria and is most familiar with Victoria’s strata legislation. Always check and use the current legislation governing your own state. State legislations vary and are state-specific. Links to each state’s own strata-title Act are provided on the “Introduction” page.