The poll we’ve been conducting for the past week has been very revealing. Okay, two of the top four items that you would cut back if your budgets got a little too tight were pretty soft targets – swimming pool heating and gardening.
But the other two suggest a deeper disgruntlement with strata life than signalled by spending less money on trimming hedges or making the pool a couple of degrees warmer.
Management fees and legal expenses were both high on the hit list.
Legal costs, I totally get, especially when it comes to internal disputes. NCAT in NSW and VCAT in Victoria were supposed to be lawyer-free until the Tribunal members realised they were spending more time explaining strata law to the combatants than they were adjudicating the rights and wrongs of their cases.
Enter the lawyers and you can end up spending a lot of money on relatively minor issues and spend even more (and not always get a satisfactory outcome) on major ones. So you can see why owners are reluctant to let their strata committees go to the barricades on every legal fight.
The question of management fees is wrapped up in how much value owners think they are getting out of their strata and building managers, as well as a misconception about how much money strata managers make.
You might look at your quarterly levies (or fees) bills and think you are in the wrong business. But most of that money is going to be passed on to service providers – it doesn’t go into strata managers’ pockets.
In fact, these days a strata manager will get about $300 per unit per year, give or take a few bucks. That’s less than half the cost of one streaming service (but not as much fun).
You can still see the results of the cutbacks poll here (and vote until midnight on Saturday). You can read readers responses on the Forum HERE and catch up with the new poll (on irritating neighbours) HERE.
And drop us a line and tell us what you think a worthy topic for a poll might be.
Elsewhere on the Forum
- Is the wiring in my ceiling common property or not? It depends. That’s HERE.
- Who’s responsible for repairing a blocked shared drainpipe under my lot property courtyard? That’s HERE.
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