Most strata owners have heard the standard advice before. Plan your maintenance, set realistic levies, keep your by-laws current. It’s all true, and none of it explains why some buildings thrive while others quietly struggle. At this week’s LookUpStrata webinar, Tim Sara from Sara Strata argued the real difference comes down to a handful of uncomfortable judgement calls that most committees avoid.
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Long tenure is an asset and a blind spot at the same time
Tim opened with a figure most people in strata will recognise. The committee member who’s been there since 2008, who can tell you exactly where every drain runs and why a particular contractor got hired over another one back in the day. That kind of history doesn’t get written down anywhere. New committee members don’t have access to it, and they often end up repeating expensive mistakes because of it.
But Tim’s point was that the longer someone sits close to a building, the harder it gets for them actually to see it. The cracks that have always been there stop registering as cracks. A lift company or plumber who’s been at a building for years, and every time someone asks whether the equipment is due for replacement, the answer is always some version of “leave it, it’ll be fine.” Usually they’re right, until the day they’re not, and the building ends up scrambling to find six figures for work that could have been budgeted over five years.
Tim believes the same thing happens to committee members and strata managers who’ve clocked up ten or twelve years on the same committee or building. He’s not pushing for mandatory turnover. He thinks that, now and then, we need to stop and ask whether the people running the building can still see it properly, or whether it’s time to get a fresh set of eyes in the room alongside them.
Hiring a third consultant is often decision avoidance wearing a tie
Consultants have their place, and Tim believes most schemes underuse them for those things that call for expert input. This may be tricky defects, big insurance calls, murky legal questions. What bothers him is what happens next. A report should be the thing a committee acts on. Too often it turns into something they hide behind or a cover for not acting at all.
If $200,000 is spent on a fix that doesn’t quite work, the committee wears that decision. Get a consultant to recommend the same spend, and suddenly the committee was following advice. That small difference in who owns the outcome is, in his experience, quietly responsible for a lot of the delay and blown budgets in strata.
Self-management works for the right reasons and fails quietly for the wrong ones
Self-management can produce excellent outcomes where a building has the skills, time and continuity to sustain it. It fails when the choice is made to avoid paying for management rather than out of capability. Tim described a scheme that saved around $15,000 a year self-managing, only to discover three years later it was facing over $400,000 in deferred maintenance and lapsed compliance obligations. The honest question for any committee considering self-management is “are we doing this because we can, or because someone here resents paying for a manager”?
Enforcement should match the building’s actual culture, and most pet, parking and letting disputes aren’t really about pets, parking or letting
A harbourside high-rise and a forty-year-old walk-up don’t share the same expectations, and importing one building’s standards onto another causes more damage than the breach itself. Tim also pointed out that fights over pets, smoking or short-term letting are usually proxy battles over the bigger question of “who is this building actually for”? Resolving the surface issue without answering that question moves the fight to parking, then noise, then renovations.
Tim closed with a simple point: the state of your building isn’t happening to you, it’s happening because of you, through what you choose to engage with directly and who you trust with what you don’t.
This post appears in Strata News #802.
Presenter
Tim Sara
Sara Strata
E: tim@sarastrata.com.au
P: 04 8500 7960
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