Going digital but keeping it personal

Going fully digital for ALL meetings barring AGM once a year.

We have more than 250 units in our building in Sydney Metropolitan Region with an experienced Strata Manager and a competent Building Manager. For nearly 2 years now, all our Strata Committee Meetings are on-line ( Paper SCMs ) with no complaints from any unit owner barring one or two owners in the initial months.

We have a system in place where ALL owners talk / contact BM, who works on a Saturday and takes a day off on a week day to be more easily accessible to Owners / residents,  for any problem and almost 95% get resolved at BM’s desk with repairs approved by SC, again digitally, if they are over the discretionary limit given to BM.

And the BM posts all works / repairs with dates, invoices, approval process on Building’s Web Portal. And SC rarely interferes with BM’s work. As a result, AF budgets came down by 6% while CWF budgets went up by over 40% ( ours a 13 year old building ) but overall total levy went up by just 4% over the last 5 years.

For a large strata, two quotes are NOT required unless cost exceeds $30,000 ( ? ). But we try to obtain at least 2 quotes even for small jobs and pay ALL bills within 2 weeks to help contractors’ cash flow. So far so good.

Key to have stress free oversight by SC is : transparency, setting an example, doing what you want others to do. Also where possible get odd jobs done by cleaners and security guards for  small payments totally under BM’s supervision. So what happens is over a period of time, these so-called employees feel like owners of Strata assets and take better care of them. SC Members can’t supervise everything,every day but with better cared employees, they become eyes and ears of the Strata.

I am sharing my experience so that others and their employees too benefit.