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Surely the Owners Corp can make this problem go away by adjusting the light!
Just for clarity: if OC is represented by strata manager and I lose, the strata still need cost orders to bill me?
Read your strata management contract. Strata managers can add extra charges to their contract. e.g. a $5 fee for overdue levy payment. My (former) strata manager charged $440 for appearing at NCAT for half a day.
Otherwise, the document linked in Jimmy’s post makes it clear that only NCAT determines who pays for costs. You have to put that request in your application.
This is also true for a breach of by-law: the owners corporation may NOT order the owner to pay a fine. The order is made by NCAT.
@Craxstar, I cannot see your document. As Jimmy explained, you need to document your communication with the strata committee. Put this in writing:
- Explanation of the problem. Photos / video would be great
- What needs to be done
- Who is responsible for it and why this is common property
Wait for their response (favourable or unfavourable)
If unfavourable response, you go to Fair Trading and request mediation.
If mediation fails (because they refuse to attend, or problem is not resolved), you receive a letter form Fair Trading to state that mediation failed.
- Then you make an NCAT application
- explaining that this is common property,
- you asked them to fix it, they refused.
- You want an order to get them to fix it and maybe, pay the costs of your strata lawyer (if you have one). The application has a list of orders and which section of the law you need to say is being broken by the Strata Committee.
At some point, they will try to bully you into paying their legal costs “when you lose”. Ignore the threats.
Look up Strata Schemes Management Act 2015. Read what it says about Strata Committee meetings. It is clear about notifying ALL owners of the strata committee meeting. Owners can attend the strata committee meeting but they cannot vote. It is not good enough to send owners the minutes after the event. Also, I would check the rules about how many people should be at the meeting.
What kind of “development application” is this? If anything changes the external appearance of common property, a general meeting of the Owners Corporation is required. A general meeting (whether it is Annual General Meeting or Extraordinary General Meeting) invites ALL owners. to pass the motion, you require 75% of the vote at the general meeting. The only exception would be environmental things like solar panels.
“Changing the external appearance of common property” can mean a lot of things. e.g. repainting the roof red, installing speed humps and bollards, building a swimming pool, solar panels, garden refurbishment.
I implore you to read the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 yourself. You should not rely on the memories of other forum members. Arm yourself with knowledge.
Hello concerned consumer
Yesterday I received an email from NSW Fair Trading. It was addressed to strata committee members, who have their email address on Strata Hub. Here is the bit you might find interesting:
“If they assist your strata scheme to secure insurance quotes, these quotes must have a breakdown of certain costs. Strata managers will be banned from getting a commission on insurance – if your scheme obtained the quote and arranged for its payment independently, without their help.”
I posted the full text of the email in a new topic (to avoid hijacking this one).
Hello Toffie
The strata manager has not handled this well. From reading your post, I assume that English is not your first language. The strata manager should take the time to explain the situation clearly. Would it help to get a friend to talk to the strata manager on your behalf?
If you are in NSW, the law is the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015. Section 107 COMMON PROPERTY MEMORANDUM helped me answer your question.
The common property memorandum is a list of what is your responsibility (as owner) and what is the owners corporation (strata) responsibility.
For intercom systems: If the unit is inside your lot and the wiring / unit only services one lot, then it is YOUR responsibility to pay for it.
If the unit services more than one lot, it is the owners corporation’s responsibility. For example, the unit outside the building, which everyone uses, is the owners corporation’s responsibility.
The strata manager should have told you this BEFORE sending someone to fix it. They should have said “you have to pay for the cost of fixing or replacing it.”
Did you send emails and SMS messages to the strata manager? Did you write something to say that you would pay for it? I don’t know if merely asking the strata manager to send someone to your home is the same as consenting to paying for the work.
The strata manager may threaten to charge interest on the outstanding amount if you don’t reimburse them now. I don’t believe they are allowed to do this unless they go to court first. A lawyer could answer that question.
You should talk to a strata lawyer. Just be aware that lawyers cost money. The lawyer might cost more than the new intercom.
You should at least arrange for mediation. Mediation is free.
I suppose people don’t see paint as being separate from common property.
Think of it like wallpaper. Common property is the wall or ceiling (the cement, bricks, wood, gyprock). What you add to it (paint, wallpaper) is not part of common property. It is part of the lot.
The lot owner in question, who is also a member of the strata committee, has said that more than one quote would only need to be presented if the quote is above 30K as per law.
Whenever someone says it is “the law” to do something, I like to check. I google searched “Strata Schemes Management Act 2015”. Scroll down to “Section 102 Limits on Spending by Owners Corporation“. Paragraph 1 says:
(1) An owners corporation must obtain at least 2 independent quotations for proposed expenditure for an item or matter that is more than the amount prescribed by the regulations for this section.
That lead me to google search “Strata Schemes Management Regulations 2016”. Section 25 says:
25 Limits on spending by owners corporations
For the Act, section 102(1), the prescribed amount is $30,000.Conclusion: the strata committee is not legally obliged to obtain a second quote. However, as Jimmy explained, owners can call a general meeting and vote in favour of getting multiple quotes. (The procedure for calling a general meeting is explained the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015.)
Would Owners’ attending Fair Trading mediation be able to make a case for more than one quote and for it to be accepted or do we just have to be strong-armed into this quote that the strata committee seems bent on.
One strata committee member has convinced the other members of the strata committee to approve $20K worth of work on their own lot. Are you concerned that this strata committee has abused their position? Is the service provider a friend/relative of that strata committee member?
Refer to the minutes of the last Annual General Meeting. At every AGM, there should be a motion passed to show if there are any limitations on what the strata committee can do on behalf of the owners corporation. If that motion has no limits on what the strata committee can do, I think it will be hard to stop this work.
For future reference, it is really important to read every motion on the AGM agenda. If you want to put a hard limit e.g. $1,000 on spending by the strata committee, owners can vote on it at the next general meeting. The argument against setting a limit is that the owners corporation would have to stop everything and call an Extraordinary General Meeting for jobs costing more than a certain amount. Owners would have to decide what is a reasonable spending limit for the strata committee.
(1) Must a strata mgr or committee inform ALL owners of a NCAT dispute for which a hearing date has been set?;
Yes. Read Section 228 Notice of Applications to Tribunal (2) of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW). I copy / pasted the paragraph here:
(2) On receipt of an application, an owners corporation given notice of an application for an order must—
(a) immediately cause a copy of the application to be prominently displayed on any notice board required to be maintained by or under the by-laws on some part of the common property, and
(b) so display the copy for the period specified in the notice for the making of submissions, and
(c) immediately serve a copy of the application on each owner of a lot in the strata scheme except an owner who is a named party to the application.(2) Must a strata mgr or committee mention in any submission to the STRATA HUB my NCAT application against the OC? Must the STRATA HUB be informed about an owner’s complaint to NSW Fair Trading against the strata mgr? Or can these matters be concealed from the STRATA HUB?
No. No. Yes. I logged into my Strata Hub account. I see no place for NCAT actions to be recorded. Here is a link to NSW Government page showing what kind of information is accessible to owners: Read under “who will have access to this information”.
Strata Hub is new. They added some new things in the past year. I think it would be a great idea to have NCAT applications (past and present) documented. However, there could be a privacy issue.
Here is a scenario: Imagine a cyclone has damaged the roof. The ceiling is stained with water but there is no hole in the ceiling.
When the owners corporation sends a tradesperson to fix the roof, one of two things happens during this scenario:
- There is NO FURTHER damage to the ceiling. It is merely stained by the water from the cyclone event. Lot owner pays for re-painting the ceiling.
- During the roof repair, the tradesperson pokes a hole into the ceiling. Now the owners corporation is responsible for fixing the hole in the ceiling and re-painting over the repaired hole.
If the water stain happened at a different location from the hole poked by the tradesman, the owners corporation may argue that they still don’t have to re-paint over the water stain.
Tell your neighbour to keep that strata committee email and store back ups on a cloud (e.g. dropbox, google drive), USB stick and paper. If she ends up applying to NCAT for an order about this, this email should be part of the supporting documentation.
Paint on the ceiling and walls is lot owner responsibility. The actual ceiling itself is OC responsibility. OC repairs the leak. Lot owner repaints the ceiling.
The lesson for you is that you should have left the ceiling unpainted before asking the OC to pay for the repaint. The Owners Corporation / strata manager needs to see that it needs the repaint work.
OC may reject your request because they have no evidence of what it looked like and they cannot determine how much that job should cost.
You can never have exact calculation for something you want to do in the future. When the time comes to do the job, you have to find a contractor to provide a quote. Everything in the capital works plan is a guess of what the work will cost (adjusted for inflation).
kaindub has the right idea. The capital works plan is simply a list of works you hope to complete in the next ten years. Beside each work, you guess how much it will cost. Since you won’t be doing everything in the next twelve months, you would assign some jobs for 2025, some for 2026, some for 2027 etc. The cost for jobs beyond 2025 have to be adjusted for inflation. Again, you have to guess the inflation rate.
I have already set up such a spreadsheet. next to each piece of work, I write the number 1, 2, 3 etc to show how many years into the future we want to do that work. That number helps me to adjust my cost for inflation one, two or three years away. Then I set up a second sheet to take a total of all the work I plan for each year. That would be a list of years 2025-2034 with how much we expect to spend.
I can adjust the estimated cost and the year I want to do the work. The capital works plan worksheet recalculates itself.
If you really want more info, I can explain the cell formulae in the spreadsheet.
The outstanding debt is $1,208
The debtor (brother) is paying $450 per fortnight.
Brother can pay this off in three fortnights, including interest. Here is my calculation.
Assume 10% pa interest added to it. I will add 3 fortnight’s worth of interest at 10% pa (but this is really an OVERestimation). With each payment of $450, the outstanding interest should REDUCE.
Interest for three fortnights = $1,208 * 0.10 / 365.25 * (3 * 14) = $13.89
Total required repayments over 3 fortnights
= debt + interest
= $1,208 + $13.89
= $1,221
If brother continues to pay $450 over the next two fortnights, he only has to pay $321 on the third fortnight:
$450 + $450 + $321 = $1,221
Ask you strata committee why they cannot wait six weeks for the entire debt to be repaid?
Even if, in six weeks’ time, another levy could have been invoiced, your brother has shown a willingness to get on top of it. A debt collection agency is unnecessary. I fear that your brother is being bullied.
I’m just a small unit owner and was browsing to find some assistance. I’m shocked every time I receive a quarterly bill from Netstrata — the fees just keep soaring!
Normally the strata levy is fixed for a full year. It should not change every quarter. Has NetStrata added interest because you did not pay all of the previous quarter’s levy on time?
To understand why levies are necessary, you should read the financial documents which accompany the agenda for the annual general meeting. Those documents show how much money was collected in levies and what they spent it on. They also tell you how much they need to spend in future years. The levies are based on that.
The levy amount you pay may not be the same as your neighbour’s levy. Each lot in the strata plan is assigned a Unit Entitlement number. People with a higher unit entitlement pay a higher levy and have a bigger vote in meetings.
Where can I get help with these constantly rising fees each quarter?
I googled “help paying levies” and found this: NSW Government: help if you cannot pay levies
It’s not that I need the strata notices to be sent to my address as I already have access to them but more that i would like my name included with hers as Owner. You see the names of the owners listed in AGM’s, extraordinary meetings when it comes to attendance, levies, etc.
As everyone else said, you cannot be listed as an owner because you are NOT an owner.
However, the owner can appoint you as their proxy for a defined period of time. Look up Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 Schedule 1, Part 4, Division 2 Section 26 “Appointment of proxies”
When you are a proxy, your name will appear on the minutes of the annual general meeting, extraordinary general meeting etc. It will not appear on any financial reports.