This is the newsletter piece that sparked the whole experiment on AI and strata. I’d been talking to an apartment-owning friend and he’d wondered how hard it would be to replace strata managers with AI.

‘You have all the knowledge stored on computers,’ he said. ‘And, let’s face it, these days the strata manager is probably consulting AI on anything they’re not 100 per cent sure about, anyway.’

True. Also, having a straight answer from an unbiased source that’s not concerned about upsetting your chairperson or developer, can only be a good thing.

Okay, I thought, I will test this. I’ve filched a question from the Lawyer in the Hot Seat overspill, one I’ve heard a couple of times from other sources, and which strata lawyer David Bannerman reckons the questioner’s strata manager got wrong. I put it to Claude.ai.

QUESTION: In an NSW strata AGM, when we vote for members on a committee of seven, and strata law says we have to vote by writing down the names of the people we want to be on the committee, do we have to write down seven names or just the ones we want to be on the committee?

Claude says: Just the ones you want. Seven is a ceiling, not a quota. Clause 10 of the Strata Schemes Management Regulation 2016 says the voter writes the names of the candidates they want to vote for, without repeating a name, and the number of names must be no more than the number of committee members the owners corporation has determined.

So with a committee of seven, writing seven or fewer names is valid. One with eight names, or the same name twice, is not. Writing fewer names doesn’t weaken your vote.  If anything, leaving names off helps your preferred candidates, because you aren’t adding to the tallies of people competing with them for the last seats.

A chair or strata manager who tells the meeting that ballots must carry seven names to be valid is wrong. Sources: Strata Schemes Management Regulation 2016 (NSW), clauses 9–10.

Chat-GPT came up with the same answer for the same reasons but added this: “If your strata manager or AGM chairperson insists that you must write seven names for your vote to be valid, you can point them directly to Clause 10(3)(a).”

So Claude, Chat-GPT and David Bannerman are in agreement. And Claude not only gave the correct answer but analysed it further in terms of voting tactics, while Chat-GPT provided the ammunition to challenge your chair.

So why wouldn’t you cut out the middle person, self-manage and consult AI on the trickier questions? Well, AI may know the letter of the law but does it have the human touch? Let’s find out. We asked Claude, Chat-GPT and Gemini (Chrome’s built-in AI) the same question.

QUESTION: There is an elderly person in our strata block (in NSW) who is hearing impaired and suffers from insomnia so they have their TV on at full volume night and day. They are nice people and recently bereaved and we don’t want to upset them but they are breaching by-laws and keeping people awake at night and disturbing neighbours during the day. What can we do?

The answers we were given were thorough, practical and responded surprisingly compassionately to the hint that we didn’t want to upset the neighbour. You can read them in full HERE.

So could AI replace strata managers? Maybe not. You need to know which questions to ask and how to ask them. And the person best-placed to do that is probably still your strata manager.

Either way, as long as AI doesn’t replace strata advice websites, I’m cool with it.