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The most interesting part of FDH’s response is how they changed their strata manager without changing the strata management firm. If I’m reading this correctly, a quiet chat with the licensee – the boss of the company – led to the incompetent SM being replaced. This is an option we don’t look at often enough here on the Forum.
Give the strata management company an opportunity to fix things before you go to the much more difficult option of trying to cancel the strata management contract (or run out it’s term).
However, if they can’t or won’t see the problem, you know it’s time to move them on.
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If you are the sole owner of your property you can self-nominate. If you are a co-owner, you must be nominated by your partner(s). If you bought the property as a company, then you’d need to be nominated by the directors of that company (in a signed letter). If you were a tenant, you would need to be nominated by an owner who wasn’t standing for election themselves.
You can write to the secretary or strata manger before the AGM and tell them you want to be nominated for election to the committee. Or you can wait for the AGM at which there will be a call for nominations.
After all the nominations are in, the chair should ask the meeting how many people they want to have on the committee. Then, if there are more nominations than seats, an election is held, with owners being provided with (if it’s done properly) blank sheets of paper on which they write the names of those they wish to vote for.
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I’m assuming you are in NSW
Firstly, asking individual owners to sign strata management agreements is weird. That’s just not how it works (and would probably be invalid, anyway).
Secondly, in NSW the initial term for all strata management agreements is one year and that only starts from when the management agreement is signed at the initial AGM. Although developers will employ strata managers to set up all the by-laws and other paperwork for the scheme, long-term contracts agreed before the initial AGM are null and void.
So let’s look at what this strata manager has done.
- Asked you, an individual owner, to sign a strata management agreement which can only be done byt the secretary or chair of the owners corporation after agreement at a general meeting. .
- Made that agreement for three years rather than the mandatory one year for the initial agreement (the limit is three years for subsequent agreements)
- Sent out the notices for the first AGM the day after the AGM would have been held.
You are dealing with a staggering level of ignorance and incompetence here. The first thing I would do is to contact a couple of other strata managers and ask them to tender for the role (and you could start with our sponsors Strata Choice).
The last thing I would do is sign these people up for anything, at any time. Google strata managers in your area and invite them to attend the initial AGM to pitch to the owners.
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The other consideration is, if the matter isn’t that big a deal, why make a big deal out of it?
If a major issue has been snuck on to the agenda, it can be challenged retrospectively at NCAT, but only provided someone was:
a) deprived of the opportunity to vote (e.g. by not knowing the matter was going to be discussed) and
b) their vote would have made a difference to the final outcome.
We can get too hung up on procedure – but we should be wary of too many decisions made on a nod and a wink.
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You should only add new items at the meeting if all owners are in attendance. Even if a majority of owners attend but some don’t you can only discuss and vote on items that are on the agenda.
This might work in a small block where everyone turns up for the meeting. But I don’t even think it’s valid if some owners are represented by proxies. It’s all about owners knowing in advance what is going to be discussed.
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Generally the chair can (and perhaps should) take the sense of the meeting and decided that certain matters may be contentious and so move them down the batting order, perhaps to get procedural matters out of the way first.
If any owner objects to this, they can raise their objections and call for a vote that the order remain the same or be changed differently .
It helps a lot if strata committees have standing orders that cover this kind of thing but almost none of them do.
And, generally speaking, the chair is in charge of the meeting, so changes must come from or through them.
Why do you ask?
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Yes, that’s Queensland. The OP is probably in NSW.
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Let’s face it, 17 years of 80 percent of cleaning bills is going to amount to a lot of illicit payments. And, since they are strata managers, they can’t claim that they didn’t know they couldn’t use the strata cleaners for their own offices.
It’s tricky, but this would be my tactic:
1. Work out how many years of this you can prove.
2. Tell them that becasue of the delay in claiming, you will accept a refund of 50 per cent of the provable cleaning bills.
3. If they refuse, tell them you will take a complaint against them at Fair Trading, and action against them in the local courts (NOT NCAT) for recovery of the overpayments.
4. You will ensure maximum publicity for the case if and when it goes to court because dodgy strata managers are in the spotlight right now.
5. (which should have been 1) talk to a lawyer.
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The simple answer is in two parts.
Firstly, the committe can just vote the two self-nominees on to the committee. That would be perfectly legal.
Secondly, they can tell the strata manager that they would like all future committee elections to be conducted by the book – no short-cuts or assumptions, with everyone made aware of who can and can’t be elected.
That would be progress.
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… or when one of your owners uses the email addresses to start campaigning about an issue.
This is what strata committees and strata managers are worried about – owners being flooded with “fake news” or, even worse, actual facts.
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Check your local planning codes – I believe only buildings 30 metres high or higher require sprinklers. Now, that may only apply to new builds but I think you might find you are under the limit. Anyway, don’t take my word for it – ask an expert.
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There are basically two kinds of strata management contracts – those that have a single fee up front for all services, those that have a reduced up-front fee plus Schedule B charges (as you have outlined has been offered to you). There is a third, actually, that has no reduction in the up-front fee and still charges for Schedule B items.
My advice is usually that if you have a stable community where there are few if any hassles, go for the reduced fee in the hope that extras will be few and far between. If you have a system in temporary (you hope) turmoil, go for the fixed fee as the higher amount would soon be overtaken by the extra charges when people contact the strata manager as they get to grips with the new regime.
It’s like you have two groups to feed – a family with a bunch of ravenous kids and a group of mature diners with modest appetities who don’t eat that much anyway.
The former, you would give the all-you-can-eat menu, because they are going to eat a lot. The latter you would give the a la carte menu because the items may cost more individually but they are going to order fewer of them
In your case, I would strongly recommend getting a fixed cost contract with few if any Schedule B items, at least until such times as everything has settled down. Ten pages of Schedule B costs are a recipe for disaster in a dysfunctional strata scheme.
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If you accept that a strata scheme is a community whose members have shared benefits and responsibilities, then you want to know who else is in that community and who has access to all your shared facilities. (Unless they are holiday lets, in which case we are expected to neither know nor care who’s in the pool with the kids.)
Also, these days, schemes with more than 50 percent of renters have to allow for the election of a tenants’ rep on the committee … but they only count tenants who are registered on the roll.
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There has been yet more to-ing and fro-ing on this and, to be honest, it’s getting us nowhere so, reluctant as I am to censor anyone, I have shut it down. There has been enough speculation (of which I have also been guilty) and we a re going round in circles.
The facts are that strata managers are advised not to provide email addresses for “privacy” reasons. There is a body of opinion that privacy laws don’t apply in this case. This opinion may be invalid. However, we can’t find a single case where the “privacy” ruling has been challenged successfully or otherwise (that’s not to say it hasn’t happened, just that we can’t find an instance).
Right now an officer at the NSW Customer Services department is contacting Fair Trading and Justice (who look after NCAT) to get a definitive ruling. So, please, no more bush-lawyering … it’s getting us nowhere.
I am interested, however, in Flatchatters’ experiences in coming up against this rule. I’m also curious to know how you’d feel about having your email address available to your fellow residents and owners, in exchange for theirs being available to you.
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