Some experience in WA from a 2018 build of a 26-unit apartment building:
- By the first AGM that owners attended, the developer had signed up all the contracts, including the embedded network for electric sub-meter reading which was 5-year contract.
- The meters and infrastructure were all owned by the Strata Co, so it appears that was all paid up-front as part of the development.
- The Strata Co buys electricity from Synergy – there is one Synergy meter and we get one bill to pay.
- The meter-reading contractor sends the Strata Manager periodic statements for each apartment, which are used to bill the owners. There was also a cloud-based repository so owners could view their energy usage online. There was also a portal where the Strata Manager/Council of Owners could view all the meters, view trends, download reports etc.
- The first year’s meter monitoring fees were included in the contract. The fee for metering was about $5,500 per annum – quite expensive considering the electricity bill for the whole building is only abut $35,000 per annum.
- We then found that despite the first years fee being included in the contract, the contractor was nevertheless submitting invoices for it from day one – double dipping. Pays to read your contracts and check your bills – don’t leave it to the strata manager. After a fight they conceded they were double dipping and we got a 12-month holiday on payments.
- Then, nearly a year before the end of the contract, the portal stopped working. Turns out that the company had been bought by another company and the contract was novated to the new company – without telling the Strata Co. They decided to scrap the original portal and all its features – again without telling anyone and without offering an alternate solution – blatantly in breach of the contract terms.
- After another fight, they too agreed to waive fees to end of the contract. However they were in the process of being taken over by a 3rd company – this time one of the big energy providers – and they could not even provide us with an offer for a new contract. Uninspiring.
- That meant we were stuck with no meter readings unless we did it manually ourselves – possible, but not too practical in the long term.
- The next problem was finding someone to take over the meter reading service. In the end we found one company (in Queensland) that knew what they were doing and we have a cloud portal operational again. And at a cost of about 1/3 of the original fees.
- In the process we also found a company that offered to buy our solar array and take over supply of electricity from us entirely – so each individual owner would have a direct contract with them. Energy supply and metering to owners would have nothing to do with the Strata Co. This required us to sign up to a 10-year contract and would have cost us about $180,000 more over the 10 year period than if we stuck with our status-quo. Needless to say we did not proceed with that.