Good advice from DaveB, and in addition to perusing the Strata Community NSW Website and linked publications, also have a look at the Strata Scheme pages on the NSW Department of Fair Trading’s Website HERE.
I’ve been managing all aspects of our Strata Scheme for almost 10 years now, and with the benefit of hindsight my only regrets are that we began the process too soon after voting that way at the Annual General Meeting, where everyone was so enthusiastic to proceed and soon thereafter even my fellow Executive Committee Members (E/C) were reluctant to even slightly participate, that all our records as kept and maintained for so long by the outgoing Strata Manager were so inaccessible (i.e. all on paper) and poorly maintained (i.e. not indexed) that it took me months to just get my mind around that, and that I didn’t anticipate those few whinging owners that nobody could please – one of those sent me 35 e-mails during Dec and Jan when a real Strata Manager would have been on holidays!
So… if I had my time over, I’d have moved from a full Agency Agreement with our then Strata Manager to one called a “Record Keeping Agreement”, where as the name implies a Strata Manager records the correspondence in and out (incl e-mails), arranges the insurance, collects the levies, follows-up late payments, prepares draft budgets, prepares meeting agendas and records the minutes, organises quotations, and then only with the prior approval of the E/C acts on correspondence, pays the bills, finalises proposed budgets, convenes meetings, engages contractors, and arranges site maintenance and repairs.
Then after 12 months or so of that arrangement while the E/C looks around for the “tools” to then collectively take-on responsibility for its finance and administration activities and considers some training necessary to thereby progress to self-management, assuming it still wants to, then it can take that step on a fully informed basis as opposed one where it just sounded like a good idea at the time.
Don’t get me wrong though, because in our 27 Lot Scheme’s circumstances almost all of our owners say that it’s the best thing we ever did – but then I’m not blind to the fact that those opinions largely driven by the average $12K per year that we’ve saved over the years, the property improvements that we’ve then been able to fund, our now healthy sinking fund, the progressive lowering of levies, and of course the fact that I do all the work for free.
Some things to think about!