I agree with the dedicated email address, and our building has its own domain name and email hosting. That way we can have a single address to all committee members – sc@xxxx.xxx.xxx as well as secretary@, chair@ etc. This also facilitates maintaining, sharing and passing on the emails as strata records.
I also think it’s good to set up clear communications protocols. I function as building manager in our self-managed scheme, and I definitely want a phone call from a resident if a pipe bursts. But I don’t want it to check when the next levy is due etc.
So I think it’s reasonable to spell out that you’ll check and respond to a special email address daily/weekly/whatever for non-urgent, routine communications. But that someone can text/phone for urgent – and spell out that ‘urgent’ means fire, flood, lift breakdown etc.
This is one of the things that used to frustrate me when we had a strata manager. That there was no avenue for truly urgent contact. In one situation we had a smoke alarm sounding, and needed to contact the resident. We couldn’t get hold of the strata manager or the property manager, so the fire brigade had to break in…to discover something had been left on the stove and the resident had gone out.