QLD: Is electricity meter reading and billing a building manager’s duty?

QLD: Our strata building has an embedded network. The building manager’s contract states he is required to read meters and issue invoice for lot use. Should this be part of the building manager’s duties?

Our strata building of 40 lots has an embedded network for our individual metered electricity supply. The body corporate buys our electricity at a bulk rate and is to recover the cost by billing each owner/occupier for there metered consumption.

The Building Manager’s contract states he should both read the meters and ‘charge agreed-on rates to the owners/occupiers for electricity consumed’. Claiming he was unable to issue invoices and meet the requirements for running an embedded electricity network, the Body Corporate had to engage a specialist firm to issue monthly invoices. This service is paid for by the Body Corporate and a monthly service fee is added to each invoice to recover these costs.

1. Should the cost of the issuing of invoices by the specialist firm be paid by the Building Manager as this is a duty within his agreement and is paid for completing this duty by the body corporate?

The Building Manager is also the short-term Letting Manager for the building and lets many apartments on a short-term basis. The Letting Manager is responsible for the electricity costs incurred by these apartments as part of the letting arrangement.

In the monthly disbursements he manages, the Letting Manager is paying for the electricity consumed component, however, is on-charging the individual owners for the monthly service fee of issuing the electricity invoices.

To me, this monthly service fee is part of the electricity bill. Our specialist service provider also agrees that this should be seen as part of the electricity bill in total.

2. Should the Letting Manager separate this cost from the electricity bill and on-charge the cost to the owner?

Answer: It would all come down to the interpretation of the manager’s agreement. It would be pretty uncommon for this to be the manager’s responsibility.

1. The answer to this question is not clear cut and would depend on the interpretation of the manager’s agreement.

   The supply and on-sale of electricity in community title schemes is strictly regulated, and significant penalties can be imposed if proper exemptions or authorisations are not in place. With that in mind, it is probably in the body corporate’s best interests to have the electricity services provided by a specialist.

   If the manager’s agreement requires them to arrange for these services to be provided to the body corporate, then there is certainly an argument that the manager’s agreement needs to be varied to remove those duties or that the manager should engage the specialist contractor. However, there is likely to be a clause in the manager’s agreement that makes specialist services a body corporate responsibility. So it would all come down to the interpretation of the manager’s agreement. It would be pretty uncommon for this to be the manager’s responsibility.

2. This would depend on the costs disclosed in the manager’s letting appointment with individual owners.

This post appears in the February 2021 edition of The QLD Strata Magazine.

Frank Higginson
Redchip Strata Law
E: FrankH@redchip.com.au
P: 07 3193 0500