Levy arrears charges need to be the fine balance between encouraging owners to pay their levies on time and covering the OC’s costs in chasing delinquent payers.
It is funny how when people buy into strata they expect everyone else to be responsible for everything, including those things that they as owners can only be responsible for.
Levies are very simple… They should be the same amount each quarter and only varied at the AGM or an EGM. With the benefit of Internet banking it is so easy to set up your direct deposits for the year in advance.
In a past life I personally delivered a good portion of levy notices to local buildings, where there were owner occupiers. It was very interesting to get those phone calls from owners when they received the levy reminder notice and stating that they never received the original levy notice.
If you look at the impact on the OC’s cash-flow in having outstanding levies, especially when you have a building manager and strata manager trying to get repairs done, but limited by late levy payers, how do you account for this cost, and or on charge same to the delinquent owners??
One option for OC’s is to look at offering the 10% discount on levies if paid before the due date per s79(4). If an OC does this responsibly they would need to budget for the amount of the discount, but again, this relies on owners realizing that they need to pay their bills on time.