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[LP]

Hi,

I’m a lot owner of a Duplex located in NSW previously managed by strata a company. When I purchased the property there was roughly 18 months to go on the strata contract. The contract was a forced one imposed by NCAT as the person I bought off was apparently a “F***wit” and was refusing to contribute to building maintenance costs etc.

Fast forward and the contract expired on the 6th of October 2025. In the lead up to the contract expiring I repeatedly asked the managing agent to schedule our AGM ( our last AGM was September 3rd 2024) and was repeatedly told they were under staffed and didn’t have time. I offered several solutions including having it during business hours, refunding the AGM portion of our management fees or extending our contract free of charge until the AGM could be held. They eventually scheduled it for October 6th, when I pointed out that this was a public holiday and they wouldn’t be working they cancelled the meeting and said they legally can’t do it after the 6th (this will come up later)

We decided to let the contract run out and self manage. On the 7th and the 8th they completed the hand over, depositing the strata plans sinking fund handing over documents etc.

Our contract had our “agreed service fee” as well as a list of fees that may be charged listed in Appendix B & D

We got sent out final statement we had been charged a $770 “Plan Exit Fee” and an $80 “trades monitoring fee” (we have used no trades this FY) neither of these fees are listed in Appendix B or D. The kicker is these fees got processed on the 7th of October (after our contract had expired and after the managing agent said they were legally not allowed to do anything for our strata plan) The managing agent is refusing to refund those 2 fees.

2 questions,

-Were they legally allowed to charge those fees?

-Is going through fair trading the best route to recover the fees?

Thanks

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