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Our 14 unit property in NSW needs a new strata manager. The current SM is unresponsive and somewhat disorganised. They seem unable (or reluctant) to provide any practical advice. We’ve tried to “train” them, but I think they are a lost cause.
We switched to this SM a couple of years ago and we got it wrong. How do we improve our chances of picking the right SM next time? What sort of questions should we be asking? How can we find out about the track record of the SM? Does SCA membership provide much comfort?
I know there are good SMs out there – I’ve worked with them before. How do we find them?
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Marvin – after almost 4 years on this Forum and even allowing for the fact that people usually post only about their problems with Strata Managers, I’d still recommend to people in your situation (and even more generally) that your Owners Corporation (O/C) works on electing a pro-active Executive Committee (E/C), that those Members complete the on-line training course provided free by Strata Community Australia (SCA), that the O/C negotiates a “record keeping agreement” with its current Strata Manager to as the title implies look after the accounts / bill paying / meetings etc, with E/C taking immediate responsibility for the day-to-day management of its Plan with the medium-term objective of progressing that to total self-management.
If and when you’re ready for self-management, there are a few expert-assisted software programs out there in the clouds that could be of considerable assistance, one of which (but not the one linked) is being developed in collaboration with Jimmy T – the moderator and chief guru of FlatChat.
Apart from the money saved by not paying Strata Managers while at the same time ‘training’ them as many are too often kids with too many Plans to “manage”, with little prior training and with no ability to know that they don’t know (enough to seek guidance from their licensee; who does), and who’s key performance indicators are weighted too heavily towards the additional income gained for their Agency (and often shared) from billing disbursements, your O/C will quickly become the practical master of its own destiny.
Someone else may wish to recommend a Strata Manager that they’ve had a good run with (if whatever criteria they use to judge that suits your O/C’s circumstances), but frankly my Plan’s been happily and cost-effectively self-managing for so long now that I simply don’t know any well enough to do that.
No Strata Manager with multiple Plans to look after can possibly look after yours as well as a proactive E/C assisting the O/C with just one!
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