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The man on the other end of the grainy Zoom call was hunched angrily in his chair. He was no longer taking notes. His sentences had become curt and dismissive. He was our property manager, and we’d just told him we were sacking him.
It was 2024, and this situation had been a few years coming. It began with a leaking roof. The top-floor flat my partner and I bought in a 1940s-era, five-unit apartment building in Melbourne had been someone’s investment property before it became our home. Either their tenants hadn’t complained about leaks or the owners hadn’t cared, but pretty soon the only thing stopping water from streaming through our light fixtures was an array of carefully placed buckets in the roof cavity. The whole thing needed replacing. But there was no money in the owners’ corporation’s maintenance fund.
The strata management company we used was one of Victoria’s largest. A revolving door of managers ostensibly took responsibility for our building, only to ignore it almost entirely until the annual general meeting and renewal of their contract rolled around.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email The committee chair, one of three owner-occupiers, had been organising quotes and chasing up most other repairs himself. We suggested setting up a building WhatsApp group, and began troubleshooting collectively. More than once, when the manager failed to respond, and we bypassed them altogether, we said: “This would be so much cheaper and more efficient if we just did it ourselves.”
A full roof replacement was too daunting to do solo, so we changed management companies. Once that was done, I set out to discover how we could dispense with property managers altogether.
Building bosses
Strata title is not strictly an Australian invention, but is often mythologised as one. Prior to the 1960s, apartment blocks, units and the like were owned by companies, and individuals bought shares that gave them the right to live in part of the property. Shares in a company title didn’t confer ownership, though, and banks’ dislike of funding the purchase of company title shares caused problems for developers. So in 1961, the NSW government introduced strata titles into law. Other states and territories quickly followed suit, and the model has since been used as a blueprint for similar schemes around the world. Accompanying the new ownership system were mechanisms for democratic, collective management by owners.
For-profit management companies have inserted themselves into that process ever since, becoming almost synonymous with the owners’ corporations that hire them. But in Victoria, only complexes with more than 100 occupiable lots are required by law to have a manager. They account for just 1% of schemes nationally, while 84% have 10 lots or fewer. Despite about 40% of strata complexes being self-managed, according to industry estimates, they remain largely invisible players in the strata system.
“People believe they need strata managers in many cases where they don’t,” says Adam Promnitz, the founder of advocacy group Strata Owners Alliance. That perception, he says, is coupled with “an arrogance within the industry that they’re infallible or that they are indispensable”.
“A lot of the managers, it’s almost like they think they’re the CEO of the building or the boss of the building, whereas they actually work for the owners.”
The alliance was founded in 2019 by Promnitz and another Victorian, Kym Murphy, who had one thing in common: each had successfully sacked their paid managers and administered their owners’ corporations themselves. The group’s founding principle was grassroots empowerment through knowledge. “Let’s just get owners together who can share tips, information, advice,” Promnitz says.
While it’s now a registered charity, for many years the alliance was a humble Facebook group – which is how I found it. I was looking for something like a DIY handbook: how to self-manage your building, perhaps a checklist of tasks to set everything up. But no such thing existed – neither in the depths of Consumer Affairs Victoria’s labyrinthine website, nor in my search feeds. Promising sources that looked independent almost invariably turned out to be businesses angling for contracts.
The industry’s main lobby group, the Strata Community Association (SCA), says it represents the interests of owners and tenants, as well as management companies. But the Victorian branch’s 2024-2026 strategic plan, in an industry analysis, listed “owners’ groups” under “threats”. It recently advocated for changes to Victorian law to make it mandatory for strata schemes with more than 10 lots to appoint a professional manager. SCA Vic was approached for comment.
“It’s self-evident to everybody but the industry how much of an issue there is with the industry,” says Promnitz. “The industry itself is almost completely blind to the level of discontent [from owners] and the amount of change which is required.”
Submissions to a recent Victorian government expert review of the Owners Corporations Act were filled with examples of what could go wrong. They detailed managers receiving huge commissions for securing building insurance; hidden financial relationships between managers and brokers or contractors; unlawful or extortionate fees; and unlawfully withholding access to details, including owners’ corporation records or funds, even after their contract had been terminated. They also mentioned “proxy-farming” – collecting absent owners’ proxy votes – in order to influence meeting outcomes.
The review found that despite an estimated 1.27 million Victorians living in strata-controlled properties, and an increasing need for high-density affordable housing, there was “declining consumer confidence” and widespread concerns about governance, transparency, professional standards and dispute resolution. Only 11% of respondents to the government’s survey believed the laws ensured managers acted honestly.
And there is little recourse for owners when confronted with wrongdoing. The Victorian review found “an absence of proactive compliance and enforcement” by Consumer Affairs Victoria and “a lack of effective deterrence for non-compliance” with the law. Meanwhile, cases took an average of 23 weeks to go through the tribunal, and only 54% were successfully resolved.
‘It was war’
For some strata complexes, the problem is other owners.
Lauren*, 45, never thought she would own her own home. It was only after her mother died in 2023 and she received an inheritance that she could put a deposit on a one-bedroom flat in a 1930s-built, 26-lot walk-up in inner Sydney.
“I didn’t know anything about what I was getting into,” Lauren says.
She spent a year in blissful ignorance, relishing the novel feeling of safety after decades of renting, until her strata fees suddenly doubled. The committee had raised levies off the back of a single engineer’s report that estimated $2.1m worth of repairs were needed to the building – including replacement of all the windows – due to water inundation, exacerbated by long-term neglect. The reports were not in the strata papers, so they hadn’t been picked up by Lauren’s conveyancer.
All but three owners – and the entire committee – were investors.
“They had no financial interest in doing maintenance, and they also couldn’t care less about the day-to-day experience of the people who live in the building,” Lauren says.
“[But] this is everything I have. I’m single. I’m the only person on the mortgage. I’ve got no family. This is it. This is me. I don’t have any out … It was war.”
Lauren compiled evidence. She contacted all the other owners directly and ensured they were informed. She built allies. She forced the committee to resign and was elected to it herself. “I was like, I would rather be getting a root canal than be elected on to this committee. But if I don’t do it, the building will fall into the street.”
Nearly two years later, Lauren says, things are slowly calming down. Two-thirds of the building is backing her, and the repairs, which were inevitable and necessary, are being performed in order of urgency and spaced out in a financially sustainable way for owners. But the experience took a huge toll.
“It made me hate my home. It made me hate every person around me,” she says. “There was no escape, you know? It just took over my entire life.”
Ten steps out
Eventually, I wrote my own self-management handbook. I cobbled together a checklist from anecdotes on the Facebook page, cross-referenced against state legislation, and sent an unsolicited message to Murphy, asking him to check it to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. I was surprised to find the transition process was just ten steps long. And when I contacted our former property manager to arrange the handover of our documents and funds, he apologised for his surly behaviour and waived the transfer fee.
Since then, we’ve muddled along fine, learning as we go. We were able to cut back the levies immediately, many by hundreds of dollars, and what we outlaid on accounting software we made back by not having to pay commission on insurance. Last year, the chair and I successfully arranged the full replacement of the building’s main electricity switchboard – a complicated and expensive process, even for a small block.
Occasionally, I am struck by fear that I’ve overlooked something or made some huge mistake. But this is my home, and it’s my responsibility to do my best to look after it.
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