I agree with Whale and ScotlandX (below – read them before you read this rant). There is very little privacy within an Owners Corporation. As an owner you are entitled to see every document produced by and for the Owners Corp or executive committee. The “commercial in confidence” concept doesn’t really apply in strata. As an owner you can go along to your strata manager and, for a fee, examine all EC files.
That’s why, increasingly, some ECs keep their real discussions “off the books”, one of the reasons I’m not keen on the Company analogy (although I can’t think of a better one).
I’m often asked to advise friends living in strata and in one building I know – with a very young, trendy and noticeably gay demographic – the EC is dominated by retired business people (RBPs) … not that there’s anything wrong with that. People with some business experience and plenty of time on their hands are often a godsend to strata buildings.
However, these particular RBPs have switched from running the building in a business-like manner to running it like a business and they think it’s perfectly reasonable to keep the share-holders (i.e. owners) in the dark about what’s really going on, have secret meetings to which other EC members aren’t privy and basically make up strata laws as they go – until some irritating “bush lawyer” has the temerity to put them right.
The bunch I’m thinking of seem to be living in a fantasy in which they are actually running a real corporations with profit and loss and share prices and homes are now referred to as “product”. They recently produced an entirely bogus “survey” in which they described the majority of owners as ‘heterosexual gays’ and ‘somewhat self-obsessed’. Needless to say, this was not for general distribution. The general thrust of the document was, I’m told, to create an entirely false “need” for a 25 percent reduction in levies which, since the finances are tightly controlled, means a 25 percent reduction in services.
Why do the RBPs want this? Because they are on fixed incomes and levies will go up just as prices do. So, to avoid this, they argue that property values are being depressed by excessive levies that aren’t offset by the attractions of the services provided.
Sounds feasible but how do we know? Well, we don’t. In fact, according to Australian Property Monitors figures, values in this particular building are currently out-performing the rest of the area by 25 percent. Apparently one RBP went ape-shit when an EC member tried to distribute this information to other EC members – yes, other EC members – and ordered them not to do so. No surprise, then, that owners are yet to receive the good news – just as they haven’t been told that their levies are the second-lowest of comparable buildings in the area.
This might all seem to be petty piddling politics but it’s sad to see a popular and largely well-managed building hurtle towards being undemocratic, elitist and run by fogies for fogies.
Pretty soon the RBPs will crank up their annual scare campaign about how expensive it would be if they had an AGM with no quorum (which has never been a remote possibility in this particular building, what with all the self-obsessed heterosexual gays wanting to know what’s going on) and use that as an excuse to hoover up an obscene number of proxy votes, currently running, I’m told, at about 30 percent of Unit Entitlements.
The realities of owner engagement (or lack thereof) being what they are, that means they will be able to select the EC of their choice, block any changes to by-laws they don’t like, promote their own agendas and remove restrictions on funds for their pet projects – which funnily enough mostly benefit other RBPs and don’t seem to have any effect on levies.
I’m reliably informed that this block’s AGM has disintegrated from a once-a-year talking shop to an all-spin, no-substance show-and-tell where the owners get shown the decisions they are about to make and told where to go if they don’t like them
So roll on the day when proxy farming is banned, EC office-bearers in large blocks have to undertake strata law training and every discussion, behind-the-scenes or at an EC meeting, has to be properly minuted and distributed to the owners and residents.
Oh, yes, and in the interests of democracy and fair play, autocratic attention-deprived RBPs should be locked up in common property stocks and pelted with bull manure for carrying boardroom bully-boy tactics into the EC arena.
The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers.