Juan
I don’t disagree with anything you say here and I’m aware that there are the Strata Management equivalents of Mega-Trawlers hoovering up small independents whose clients often find they have gone from being managed by a bloke round the corner in an Estate Agency that they could drop into, to a kid with a headset in a hot-desking office who has to spread their time very thinly between the maximum number of clients.
Part of the problem is that it takes as much time (sometimes more) to manage a small 12-lot walk-up as it does to look after a building 10 times that size, especially if the former is old and crumbling and the latter is shiny and new. But the strata management firm gets one-tenth of the income for doing more work.
In any case, your question is very timely because Strata Community Australia (the strata managers’ professional body) have just launched an initiative to provide accreditation for strata manager across the country. Have a look HERE if you’re interested.
On a general note, I think the actual strata manager is more important than the firm he or she works for; you get good SMs working for crap firms and vice versa.
And as for these strata managers whose client lists are being absorbed by bigger firms, the contract can’t be sold without the individual Owners Corps’ permission. And that’s when we get back to your description of the uninterested and self interested.
Whether we like it or not, the buck stops with us. We can choose who manages our buildings and under what terms but, like everything else in life, you get what you pay for. If an Owners Corp is obsessed with keeping the levies low and that means getting the cheapest Strata Manager, they shouldn’t expect them to do anything more than the bare minimum.