Is joining your committee really worth the stress?

There’s an old adage in apartment living that the people you really want on your strata committee are too busy making the money they need to service their mortgages to spare any time for ultra-local politics.

Comparing the cost of your time spent on strata stuff with any financial benefit from helping to maintain the value of your property, the ledger is hard to balance. But one option worse than getting elected to your strata scheme’s ruling body might be not even trying.

In an ideal world, your committee would have a lawyer, an accountant, a building engineer, an architect, an interior designer, a property valuer, a real estate agent and, most importantly, an experienced mediator.

In reality, you are more likely to find it salted with one or two useful professionals outnumbered by volunteers who might be doing more harm than good.

They could be fixed income retirees who will fight any rise in levies to the death, regardless of whether the payments are justified or even necessary.

Then there are the over-mortgaged newbies, looking into the interest rate abyss and hoping that being part of decision-making might mitigate against financial ruin.

There will be the self-interested, there to push their own agendas and, conversely, those who join solely to make sure are no decisions made that might disrupt their lives.

Toss in a couple of lost and lonely souls seeking a substitute for a social life, and add  the gossips and conspiracy theorists needing material for their fractious fictions.

Wrangling this motley crew, you might have a “my way or the highway” bully for a chair or a passive patsy who does whatever the strata manager says.

Then there is the cosy coterie of “mates” who manage to manipulate the elections so that no one outside their tight mutual interest group ever gets a sniff of the power or oversight of decision-making.

Often that’s for no more sinister reason than simply wanting to maintain the status quo. Occasionally, dodgy deals have been done, or maintenance has been neglected to keep the levies down, and they don’t want anyone rocking the boat.

To be fair, you would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to have all of these flawed characters on your committee, but it only takes two or three to gum up the works.

So what do you do?  The obvious answer would be to stand for election yourself, but if you are already stretched at work, do you really want to deal with the petty politics of a strata scheme?

And make no mistake, it is political; they don’t call strata the fourth tier of government for no reason. However, the elected representatives aren’t remote figures whom the voters occasionally see on TV and in newspapers.

You will meet your constituents in lifts and carparks and they will want to know what you’re doing to solve a problem about which they are highly agitated but you might not even be aware.

As in federal, state and council politics, there will be rival factions: the spenders and the scrimpers, the investors and the residents, the old guard and the new blood, the by-law quoters and the rule-benders.

And there may be power junkies who can rig votes and elections with a ruthlessness that would make Vladimir Putin blush.

So what do you do to protect your personal investment? The truth is, in the short term at least, there is only so much damage a dysfunctional committee can do to the value of the apartment block and the homes in it.

If you compare potential losses to the personal cost of unpaid work on the committee in terms of your rate of pay in your day job, it doesn’t make much sense. You are unlikely to save that much money unless your committee is a clown car of incompetents driving the block towards certain disaster.

But that’s why you need to sign up for a year or two, just to see how things work … or don’t. Think of it like a hobby or going to the gym; effort and time expended for no obvious gain.

It will be an education, juggling personalities and agendas, along with misinformed biases and wilful ignorance. And if you survive you could try for an easier gig, like standing for parliament.

This column first appeared in the Australian Financial Review.