One of my neighbours is from an overseas English speaking country. She said that she had no idea about strata until after she purchased her home.
Just before we became self managed, I spent a lot of time reading the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, the Fair Trading web site, various strata legal web sites and flatchat, of course.
My beef is with unscrupulous strata managers. They want to keep us in the dark. Our owners corp was paying around $6,700 in fees and getting poor service. The management fees were supplemented by other fees such as insurance valuation, “postage, copying, calls”, tax return, capital works review, updating by-laws. We had overpriced electricity and trades people.
I noticed that we paid over $100 per year for a tax return. I called the ATO and they confirmed it was not necessary. We have no taxable income. I organised an EGM to instruct them to stop doing tax returns and to let us approve every repair first. They resigned.
Anyone who is not interested in how their strata is run, is paying a “lazy tax”.