Tag: oc-committees

AGM meetings

 

 

There is one event each year when every lot owner is asked to spend a little time thinking about how their building is run: the Annual General Meeting, or AGM. These days it is usually held online.

A thick PDF attachment arrives in your email inbox. It looks complete, professional, carefully prepared. If you are a long-standing lot owner for the building, it may also look very familiar. Most of the pages in the lengthy AGM notice are likely to be part of a standard template that rarely changes over the years.

Two reports, one from the chairperson of the committee and one from the strata manager, are new and should be read. The latter in particular may contain vital information.

Other important new pages, however, are those devoted to financial statements, including past and estimated annual budgets.

By the time the new budget estimates for the current financial year reach the committee and lot owners for a tick of approval in its ballot box, their contents have already been shaped, checked and printed.

Budget estimates are usually built on previous years’ spending, adjusted for inflation, updated for new contracts such as insurance, and amended to include forthcoming maintenance work. Other items, however, can look remarkably similar from one year to the next. Categories such as General Maintenance often appear to have been rolled over with only minor adjustments. That does not necessarily mean they are wrong, but it does raise a useful question: were the figures worked out again from scratch this year, or simply carried forward from the previous year with small adjustments?

Here’s how that matters in practice.

When you look at a budget item such as General Maintenance, it’s easy to treat it as a fixed expense. But what does it actually consist of and why does the committee have no knowledge of any “general” maintenance carried out? One likely answer is that many strata management contracts include provisions allowing the manager to hire a technician or tradesman without first seeking three quotations each time because of the small cost involved. At other times the issue, such as a blocked pipe, might have required immediate attention.

Alternatively, you may get an item called General Plumbing Maintenance or General Electrical Maintenance in the budgets with no other explanation. 

This avoids delays that can end up being more costly than the original expense, which is fine. But it also means that it can sometimes leave owners feeling uninformed about spending decisions.

This is where committee members play a role. It is not to query the budget line by line. But it is okay to expect that a paper trail for those smaller expenses does exist, perhaps in the form of an email to the committee with a photo, while invoices can be posted to the committee’s portal if they  have one.

And then there’s the approval process. By the time a budget is presented in a Notice of AGM, it has usually passed through multiple layers: manager preparation, software input, auditing and printing. So, what you are seeing is not the raw financial data of the building. It is the version of it prepared, checked and presented by the managers and their administrative systems before owners ever see them. It can and does happen many times that the strata committee also gets to see the past expenditure and proposed budget for the first time when the printed agenda arrives. 

This may create the assumption among owners that there is no point in attending the AGM each year because everything has already been decided. All too often, by the time the lot owners who do attend work through a long list of ballot boxes that have to be verbally voted on or with a show of hands, there is not enough time left in their Zoom or Teams meeting to allow for broad discussion.

As many of you would know, the first 45 minutes of an online meeting is free. After that with Zoom, if you want longer meetings you have to upgrade to Zoom Pro, which is currently Aus$19.90 per month, $118.80 pa. This subscription is typically shared among the manager’s clientele of numerous strata buildings so there should be only a small additional charge.

With Teams it’s different. If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription (and most companies do) there is no further charge for a longer meeting.

But this is the point where you have to look at your Strata Manager’s contract. In some contracts the strata manager’s time for chairing a meeting is typically free for the first 45 minutes or one hour, depending on the contract, then typically $240-$280 per hour after that. If, however, the meeting is held after 5.00 pm working hours, the manager’s fee per hour may be doubled.

For many strata managers, the latter is their “get out of jail card” and they may look a bit relieved when they can declare after 45 minutes that time is up and the meeting is about to close. The reason they give is that it is necessary in order to save the owners corporation money. They are the good guys.

However.

For the lot owners who have tuned in, the real meeting was about to move on to the general discussions. After all, it is usually only at the one general meeting every year that they have the opportunity to speak face-to-face (sort of) with their manager and the members of the committee, or to share their views with other lot owners. Suddenly the meeting is closed, and that is that for another year.

In addition, the meetings are often held during Australian working hours to avoid charging double for the manager’s time as chairperson of the meeting. For a lot of owners, that timeslot is simply not practical. Then of course there are the interstate and overseas lot owners, whose clock is completely different and those lot owners who are shy about speaking if they are not confident of their English.

 

When you take all of that into consideration, is it really a surprise if you log in to you AGM and find that you are the building’s only lot owner who has?

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.

 

Victoria’s New OC Regulation

The missing linkS in every strata scandal story

by Mary R.

Welcome to my first article for this blog. I hope you find it useful. It is an opinion piece based on private research. I have included source links at the end of the article. I am not a lawyer or an accountant and do not offer legal or financial advice. This is a not-for-profit blog.

Victoria has introduced one of the biggest shakeups in owners corporation law in nearly two decades. An expert panel, convened through the Engage Victoria consultation process, spent part of 2025 reviewing the Owners Corporations Act 2006. Numerous submissions were made, and the state government has now signalled that for the first time, it will introduce a licensing regime for owners corporation (OC) managers. On paper, that sounds like what the Victorian OC sector needs.

Then comes the detail. Rather than requiring OC managers to complete the full Certificate IV in Strata Community Management, the qualification purpose-built for the job, the government has accepted a watered-down version: a handful of units, not the whole certificate.

The layout below for the new regulations is based on that provided by Consumer Affairs Victoria for registered managers and Officers in Effective Control (OIEC).

Change Requirement Deadline
Initial training Registered managers and OIECs must complete five core units of the Certificate IV in Strata Community Management. 30 Jun. 2027
Register Register as an OIEC if you run day-to-day operations of an OC management business. (1 Aug. 2027 for existing registered businesses.) 30 Jun. 2027
Annual CPD Complete around five CPD (Continuing Professional Development) units per year. From 1 Apr. 2028

The five CPD activities per year can include written assessments, seminars, webinars, some in-house learning sessions.

Who else gets this deal?
Try to imagine any other regulated profession making the same pitch. An electrician arguing they should be licensed on five units of the electrotechnology certificate because a full apprenticeship is inconvenient for employers. A financial adviser wanting partial credentialing because the full diploma will cost them more money. Or howabout a bookkeeper with no credentials because they can add up and subtract?

None of these arguments would get past a first meeting with a regulator, let alone become government policy. Yet OC managers – who hold signing authority over building insurance, control multimillion-dollar maintenance and capital works funds and interpret legislation that determines how disputes and levies are handled – are being told that a fraction of the relevant training is enough.

This isn’t a trivial administrative role. An OC manager’s decisions directly affect the largest asset most Victorians will ever own. Getting it wrong on insurance adequacy, defect liability timing, or fund mismanagement can cost owners tens of thousands of dollars, or worse, leave a building underinsured when something goes wrong.

The lot owners paying for this arrangement
The people whose assets are on the line are, in many buildings, more qualified in their chosen careers than the managers being asked to maintain those assets, both physically and financially. Lot owners will consist of investors and owner occupiers who are engineers, teachers, skilled tradespeople and many other professionals who spent years and often tens of thousands of dollars earning full accreditation in their own fields.

These are the same owners now being asked to hand management of their asset, and trust in the professional judgement behind it, to someone the government has decided only needs to know part of the vocational syllabus. That’s not a small inconsistency. It’s a direct question of whose convenience the regulation is designed to protect: the government’s moderate costings for regulating a huge and growing sector of the state, or the owners whose money and property are actually at stake.

What about the WA comparison?
Western Australia (WA) has taken the opposite path to Victoria. Its 2025 regulatory reforms set a full, completed Certificate IV in Strata Community Management as the benchmark for anyone acting as a strata manager or principal of a strata management business, with the requirement phasing in through a transition period to November 2027.

A narrower, reduced-unit pathway exists in WA too, but it’s not a general concession to the industry – it’s reserved for people who already hold a comparable licensed qualification, such as an existing real estate licence.

WA is already on the path to requiring the full qualification. There’s no publicly documented data yet showing in what way WA strata firms have been affected because of the full Certificate IV requirement – largely because the compliance deadline hasn’t even arrived.

NSW already answers the “partial units” question
If you want to see what a genuine, defensible partial-qualification pathway looks like, NSW already has one – and it undercuts the case for Victoria’s approach rather than supporting it.

NSW runs a tiered licensing system. At the bottom is the Class 2 Assistant Agent: an entry-level, closely supervised role. An Assistant Agent needs only five units from the Certificate IV in Strata Community Management to start (previously 7 units), plus three further units each year as ongoing professional development. Crucially, an Assistant Agent cannot run a scheme independently and works under the direct supervision of a fully licensed agent.

To become a licensed Class 1 Strata Managing Agent – the person actually authorised to manage an owners corporation’s affairs – the full Certificate IV is required: 18 units in total, 14 core and 4 elective. And that more senior Class 1 licence, the only one that can authorise trust account withdrawals, also requires prior two years working as a Class 2 agent.

In other words, NSW’s system already contains exactly the kind of unit pathway the Victorian industry has been lobbying for – it’s just not attached to the role that actually manages your building and your money. NSW’s answer to “should partial training be enough?” is yes, for trainees – and no, for the person who “holds the keys”.

Full Certificate IV courses are not prohibitively expensive
The online course offered by SCA’s Strata Education, has the full 18 units:  SCA Members: $2,990; Non-Members: $4,500. (All prices as of 12 July 2026). Certificate IV | Strata Community Management

And Sapere has estimated for the new amendment that: “The cost of attending a CPD session is $55 per hour”.  www.thinkSapere.com i.e. $275 per year.

What was actually driving the need for reform in the OC management sector?
Having properly qualified OC managers does matter. Consumer Affairs Victoria’s complaint data on the sector shows persistent, recurring themes: undisclosed commissions, proxy vote manipulation at meetings, and governance failures around how funds and records are managed.

These aren’t cases produced by a handful of bad actors slipping through an otherwise sound system – they’re a pattern, significant enough that the government’s own review treated it as evidence the existing (unlicensed) framework isn’t working.

A licensing regime introduced in direct response to that pattern of harm is a strange place to introduce a qualification standard weaker than the one already operating in NSW and WA.

To professionalise an industry means finishing the job
Strata living now accounts for roughly one in four Victorians, according to a state government source, and that share is only growing as the state’s apartment stock ages and densifies. The government’s own review acknowledged that complaint volumes to Consumer Affairs Victoria remain persistently high, with hidden commission and governance failures recurring themes. This is precisely the environment in which under-qualified managers do the most damage, and precisely the environment in which a genuine, complete professional standard matters most.

If the sector is serious about being treated as a profession, it must accept what every other regulated profession accepts: the qualification is the qualification, not a negotiable subset of it. It’s hard to defend a small partial qualification as the foundation of Victoria’s first licensing regime, introduced specifically because the old, looser standard wasn’t good enough.

Why Victoria’s Strata Manager Qualification Falls Short
The Victorian government has chosen the 5-unit option seemingly on the grounds that mandating the full certificate course will create additional costs, both for the student, as mentioned above in the course and training fees, but also in terms of government oversight to ensure the new regulations are being adhered to.

Another measuring stick was the number of complaints to VCAT and its Tribunal. To what extent, for example, will having an 18-unit full certificate justify the cost by being more successful in reducing VCAT’s caseload than a less-costly 5-unit partial certificate? Although the figures supplied for comparison are the results of careful calculations by professionals they are, nevertheless, estimates.

Burnout and undertraining are the same problem
Industry commentary points to a second, compounding culprit: burnout, driven by the sheer number of properties a single OC manager is expected to handle, anecdotally cited as up to 600 or more apartments. Data supplied by MRI Software show that 60% of strata managers work more than 38 hours a week, and 19% work more than 51 hours, while 33% of strata managers changed employers in a single year.

But an overloaded portfolio and a thin qualification aren’t rival explanations. They’re the same problem from two angles. A manager with only five units of an eighteen-unit qualification has less depth to fall back on when that workload gets heavy. Overwork degrades judgement, and a partial qualification means there was less sound judgement to degrade in the first place.

Fixing the licensing standard without addressing caseload treats one symptom while ignoring the other, and neither problem excuses the government settling for a fraction of the training the job requires.

The scale of reponsibility
Even taking a conservative figure of 400 lots makes the scale of responsibility clear. Cotality’s Home Value Index put the median unit value in Melbourne at $636,769 as of June 2026. On that basis, a Victorian OC manager handling the governance of 400 lots potentially with a combined resale value of worth hundreds of millions – even more for those managers handling about up to 800 units.

These are national workload averages applied to a single city’s property values, so the figures are illustrative rather than exact – and if anything, conservative, since Melbourne unit prices sit well below those of Sydney. But even on a cautious reading, one person is nominally accountable for the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in property, spread across hundreds of separate owners, buildings, insurance policies and compliance obligations. That is a far more plausible driver of customer dissatisfaction.

Managers who are properly trained and formally qualified are likely to feel more confident handling the scope of what their role demands. More confidence typically means less stress. Undertrained staff thrown into high-stakes, high-responsibility roles are the ones most likely to burn out and leave.

It’s worth being clear about what professional education would and wouldn’t fix here. Burnout in most vocations tracks workload, not qualification level. Raising education standards alone won’t relieve a manager carrying a heavy load.

Committees carry a legal risk
But that isn’t the only problem worth solving. Under Victoria’s Owners Corporations Act 2006, legal responsibility for compliance rests with the owners corporation itself. The committee – typically a handful of volunteer lot owners with no strata management expertise – administers this on the OC’s behalf, while the manager is only ever engaged as their agent. It is the committee that faces so much of the underlying legal exposure. How is it fair to expose volunteer OC committees to heavy legal responsibility without also guaranteeing they get a high level of professional assistance?

That is precisely where an undereducated manager becomes a liability rather than a convenience. A committee that cannot trust its manager’s judgment is forced either to take advice on faith – carrying legal risk it doesn’t know it’s carrying – or to independently verify decisions when it thought it had engaged a professional manager specifically to avoid having to do that.

Neither is what a volunteer committee signs up for. Fully qualified managers let committees rely on professional judgment with some confidence, rather than second-guessing every decision on assets worth millions of dollars.

Most lot owners – especially the ones living overseas – don’t have a clear picture of how different the training standards are across Australia. And even if they did, it’s not obvious it would change much at the point of purchase. Queensland apartments are selling like hotcakes, for example, and nobody pauses mid‑auction to check the strata manager’s framed certificate. When the capital gains are good, ignorance is fine.

That’s not an argument against regulation, it’s the argument for it. If buyers can’t or won’t do the vetting themselves, even when the information is available, the protection has to be built into the licensing standard rather than left to individual due diligence. In Victoria, where apartment prices have stagnated, lot owners don’t have the luxury of indifference and would benefit from being able to assure potential buyers that the regulatory standards for the management of their future asset are in the top level of  international standards.

Government-mandated strata manager certificate requirements in Australia (July 2026)

VIC 5 units of Certificate IV
NSW Full Certificate IV
QLD None mandated
WA Full Certificate IV
SA None mandated
TAS None mandated
ACT Moving to NSW standard
NT None mandated

Victoria’s 5-unit requirement sits closer to Queensland’s unregulated end of the table than to the full Certificate IV standard NSW and WA have adopted.

This blog is fully independent and self-funded. I don’t offer legal or financial advice. When such advice is needed, you should always consult a professional in those disciplines. Use the links provided here as a starting point and always verify the specific, current legislation governing your own state. 

APPENDICES

(1) Strata management requirements internationally (July 2026)
 
Country Typical qualification requirement
England No government licence. Professional qualifications are common but voluntary.
Canada (Ontario) Government licence, approved education, examinations and supervised experience.
USA Varies by state. Some require education, exams and licensing; others have no licensing.
India No mandatory licence. Qualifications are generally determined by employers.
New Zealand No specific strata manager licence. Industry qualifications are common but voluntary.
Singapore Accredited certificate, legislation exam, experience, annual CPD and code of ethics.
China (Mainland) No national licensing system specifically for strata or apartment managers. Large developments generally employ professionals.
Hong Kong Mandatory education, experience and licensing under the Property Management Services Ordinance and hold a licence issued by the Property Management Services Authority (PMSA).
South Korea Apartment complexes require a licensed Housing Manager (Jutaek Gwallisa). Managers qualify through a national examination and proscribed practical experience.
Taiwan Condominium management companies and management personnel must meet statutory qualifications and hold government registration or permits, plus ongoing training.
 

(2) Australian sources

(3) Overseas government sources

England – UK Government guidance and legislation on residential property agents (no statutory licensing system).
Ontario – Condominium Management Services Act, 2015 and the Condominium Management Regulatory Authority of Ontario (CMRAO).
USA – State licensing agencies (e.g. Nevada Real Estate Division).
India – No national licensing legislation for property managers.
New Zealand – No dedicated body corporate manager licensing legislation.
Singapore – Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Strata Management accreditation framework.
China – Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) property management regulations.
Hong Kong – Property Management Services Authority (PMSA).
South Korea – Korean Ministry of Government Legislation, Multi-Family Housing Management Act.
Taiwan – Ministry of the Interior, Condominium Administration Act.

(4) Recommended printed media sources

“Victorian watchdog fails to deregister any strata managers despite thousands of complaints” The Age – 4 June 2026.
“Secret commissions: Strata managers pocket millions from insurance deals” The Age – 6 June 2026. Keywords: insurance kickbacks, conflicts of interest, hidden payments, PICA Group lobbying.
“Owners left in the dark as strata managers charge unlawful fees” The Age – 8 June 2026.
“Consumer Affairs Victoria accused of ignoring systemic misconduct in strata industry” The Age – 10 June 2026.
“Victorian government launches review into strata industry after Age investigation” The Age – 12 June 2026.
“Strata managers using proxy votes to entrench control, owners say” The Age – 15 June 2026.

 

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.

 

 

 

Is strata software making better decisions or just faster ones?

 

 

These days, many owners corporations are serviced by strata management companies using some form of computer software. Committee members as well as all lot owners know there is an online portal where they can view documents, check their own levy balance or read meeting minutes. Behind the scenes, however, these systems do far more than simply store files.

Good software has obvious advantages. It keeps records together, makes it easier to find old documents, produces financial reports and perhaps also prepares some BAS statements. This helps strata managers keep track of hundreds of buildings at once. I have read that thanks in part to AI software, a single strata manager is expected to handle as many as 600 to 800 apartments (with help from a lot of support staff such as accountants, senior managers and data specialists).

But there is one thing software cannot do. It cannot tell whether the information being keyed into the platform is accurate. Like the old cliché about earlier computer systems: garbage in, garbage out.

If an expense is allocated to the wrong account, every financial report that includes that expense will faithfully repeat that mistake. The software hasn’t made an error. It has simply recorded what someone told it.

One one occasion I asked for copies of our BAS statements. They came as summaries and mixed in with them was one BAS summary from a different strata building with a similar name. Human error exists and we have all been guilty of it at some time but it can have an impact on total costings.

That is why committee members should never assume that a neat report is automatically a complete or accurate one. Modern software can produce impressive graphs and summaries, but they are only as reliable as the information entered into the system in the first place.

Pundits will fairly argue that there are many crosschecks in today generations of software that will pick up any human errors or glitches. That may be true, but I have seen one or two serious errors in software-generated financial statements that seem to have slipped through its inbuilt checks and balances.

There is another issue that committees should keep in mind. Software is very good at recording events. It is not so good at explaining them.

This is where committees still have an important role. Rather than simply accepting reports at face value, members should feel comfortable asking questions such as: “Why is the budget allocation for building insurance so much more expensive this year than last year?”.

Technology is a useful tool, and most committees these days are so used to it, they would struggle without it. But it is still only a tool.

One thing to keep in mind is the speed at which AI programs are rapidly evolving. If there are any limitations to AI strata management applications, the developers may have already dealt with it by the time you read this.

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.

 

Who manages your building? (And why it may not be who people think)

 

If you ask many rental residents who manages their building, the answer is often immediate: “the strata manager.” It is an understandable assumption. They send the emails, issue meeting notices, arrange the repairs, issue breach notices and often appear to be the only consistent point of contact. Their address, email and phone number will be on every strata-connected notice they receive. There is also, on strata buildings in some states, a prominent notice at the entrances to their buildings, displaying the managing agent’s contact details.

Some strata management companies also use the words “Owners Corporation” or “Body Corporate” somewhere in their business names, which may reinforce the perception that they are the building’s owners corporation itself. That is one common misunderstanding in the strata world.

The reality is that no single person manages the building. Instead, there are three overlapping roles that share responsibility in different ways.

(1) At the top sits the owners corporation. This is not a company in the traditional sense. It is simply all of the lot owners collectively. It is the legal entity that owns and is responsible for the common property. When major decisions are made, such as approving a special levy, authorising significant works, authorizing new contracts for maintenance or managment, or setting the annual budget, they are made on behalf of this group.

Because it is not practical for all lot owners to manage day-to-day decisions, a committee is elected at every AGM. The committee is where most of the practical governance happens. It reviews budgets, signs contracts, considers maintenance issues and oversees expenditure within its delegated authority.

(2) Then there is the strata manager. This is the role most people interact with directly, and for that reason it is often assumed to be the “control centre” of the building. In reality, the strata manager is an external contractor delegated by the owners corporation to carry out administrative and coordination tasks. They implement decisions, manage records, hire contractors, prepare financial reports, and assist with compliance processes.

Over the past decade, much of the day-to-day administration in the larger strata management companies is handled by office staff and accountants through software systems tailored for strata management. The software can assist in or take over many management chores. This includes generating financial reports and AGM documentation, issuing minutes of meetings, collecting levies and quickly dealing with unpaid levies.

I am a partial fan of strata management software. I have found that overall, if it is used to its full potential, it can greatly improve the level of transparency between managers and strata committees. The downside is that all those charts and summaries can be used as a substitute for the actual fully-detailed documents that committees need to examine in their governance role.

If you have the original bank statements for the strata account, for example, it is easy to check if the summaries have diverged from what appears to be the reality. This does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the summaries or graphs, but it does mean that a follow-up question is necessary.

(3) The next role worth considering is that of onsite managers. They should be hired after consultation with the strata committee. Because they are “at the coalface” they handle many common problems and requests, such as lost keys and noisy neighbours. They also regularly inspect the building for any urgent or developing maintenance problems.

This is where a grey area emerges, because in smaller apartment buildings (between four and 50 lots for example) there is rarely enough levy income to afford a fulltime or part-time onsite manager. The contracted cleaners, who are usually onsite for only a few hours a week, are not engaged to act as de facto caretakers or onsite managers.

In Australia, strata managers are not onsite managers, as they may be in other countries. They can’t be. Most of them handle a number and variety of buildings. Further, under the terms of their contract, they may not be required to regularly or occasionally visit the building, although many do. There is a reason for this reluctance.

Since Covid 19, there has be a drift away from strata management staff working in large head offices and many managers now work from home. Commercially, this is a universal trend and it’s potentially a good one since it should reduce overheads. In theory at least, strata managers could live anywhere, including interstate, and stay in touch by phone and email, so long as they are registered with the state and meet its additional insurance indemnity, character and financial requirements.

In practice, strata managers working interstate and familiar with their own state’s strata regulations and Act, will discover that each state has its own Act and regulations and they can be remarkably different, often crucially so.

So who, then, is going to do those regular inspections around the smaller buildings that in larger buildings are done by onsite managers? The residents usually, including not only onsite owners and committee members but also the tenants. The communication between tenants/lot owners and managers often forms an informal reporting network, of which the committee may not always be fully aware.

This is where the committee’s role becomes important, even if it is not always visible to residents. The committee is meant to ensure that decisions are not simply being implemented efficiently but were appropriate in the first place and not just a knee-jerk reaction to an aggressive resident.

It also means asking whether budgets are realistic and whether the information being presented truly reflects the actual condition of the building, particularly as it ages. All too often its maintenance is portrayed by the manager as up-to-date until suddenly it isn’t.

Information often arrives in processed form, such as summaries and reports, rather than raw data. So much so that by the time a decision request reaches the committee, it can seem that there is nothing left to do except “rubber stamp” it.

This is not necessarily a problem. Most strata systems rely on this structure to get things done in a timely manner. But it does mean that good governance depends on the willingness to ask what lies behind the information being presented.

Who recommended this contractor? What were the alternatives? What actually happened in the incident that is being described in vague terms? These are not confrontational questions. They are what separates passive approval from active oversight. And that is why understanding the management structure matters.

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.

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.

 

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