@Whoopi said:
But until you have lived in one of these Fiefdoms you cannot fathom the impact it has on one’s life. My advice to anyone ever considering buying into Strata is DON”T. You place your money and your property in the hands of volunteers, untrained in any way for the job . No business acumen, no building experience and no people skills. Emotionally immature despots who are attracted to being on a committee due to a hunger for control, power and the access to the considerable money available to them.
Well, I have lived in one of those fiefdoms and, in fact, it was working through it that led to the Flat Chat column and this website. The developer, the strata manager and the chairman – a crook and a bully – were in cahoots. We were being ripped off, lied to and publicly humiliated; blamed for everything that went wrong by the same people who rushed to take credit when things started going right.
It can be hard, frustrating and heart-breaking . I made enemies and lost friends and sometimes felt like giving up.
But if you can separate your emotions from what needs to be done, identify the problems that are the highest priority and the solutions that have the highest chance of success, and then just drive towards that simple first step, you will make progress.
At the end of the day, your investment of time, money and energy with either pay off or it won’t but, at the very least, you will have learned something about yourself and about other people.
And that’s worth something.