This article about creating community has been supplied by Julie Grove, StrataVault.
If you don’t know who your owners and residents are, is there a sense of community in your building?
Take the recent example of Paradise Towers which is at the centre of a messy body corporate dispute after police officers raided the complex over illegal prostitution allegations.1 This illustrates the need for a building to have an active community presence to eliminate these potential risks.
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We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of body corporate living in Australia but find obvious governance issues. Community needs to be created by body corporate to facilitate transparency and open lines of communication.
As a body corporation you can create a community by doing these two key things:
Implement an active online discussion board
People will instantly feel connected and a part of a community if they are across what is happening in their property. A discussion board creates familiarity with owners and stakeholders and reduces multiple calls and emails managers receive when something in the building goes wrong.
A pipe burst on the tenth floor of a scheme I was managing; we couldn’t find the plans nor the historical records of the building to determine if this had happened in the past and what the right course of action was. On top of receiving dozens of phone calls from tenants reporting the problem and wanting updates. Frustrations are high and patience is low in these situations; people want access to information quickly.
StrataVault is a secure cloud-based platform, designed for the Strata Industry to help manage communication throughout a building. It has a 24/7 online discussion board accessible to whoever has been provided permissions. With the case above, one post on the discussion board to report burst pipe, followed by an update from body corporate provides instant transparency and keeps everyone satisfied.
Communicate building outcomes, updates and successes
More often than not, residents tell me they don’t know what the outcomes are after attending the annual committee meeting each year. We can change this, by implementing an accessible place for owners, residents and stakeholders to obtain information promotes good communication and emphasises the value of community and being connected.
StrataVault provides this option in a secure way. Managers have the authority to tailor viewing permissions and access to a vault with just a click. Permissible access to documentation means as a manager, you can grant transparent visibility of relevant information to committee members and stakeholders. A link via email is received by the stakeholder to enter the vault and access the information at their fingertips.
Benefits
Time spent on the exchange of physical documents between manager and stakeholder is eliminated. As a body corporate manager, providing owners and stakeholder with transparency to a building’s historical and present books and records eliminates owners feeling isolated and reduces the risk of you not being across what is happening within the building.
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Read next:
- How to deal with noise complaints when living in a Strata Community
- QLD: Q&A What about good old body corp community?
Julie Grove
E: [email protected]
P: 0419 298 338
W: StrataVault
This information is not intended to be personal advice and you should not rely on it as a substitute for any form of advice.
This post appears in Strata News #257.
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