A Few Important Things to Know About Body Corporate Management
If you own a property that’s part of a body corporate or strata scheme, it’s essential to ensure that the body corporate is managed properly to ascertain everything runs in a smooth manner.
But What’s a Body Corporate?
A body corporate represents the unit owners of a property. The individual owners own the ‘lots’ of the property, but the strata own the common areas including the foyer, gardens, etc. This is a legal corporation that’s created under the State’s Act, and so, it has legal duties, powers, and obligations to adhere to. Some of the responsibilities include:
- Manage the common property such as insurance, collective funds, and finance administration.
- Keep records of all meetings, motions, and document decisions.
- Ascertain that all common areas are in good condition
- Maintain a budget
- Ascertain that all documentation is available for unit owners when requested.
Proper Body Corporate Management
Things can go south pretty quick if body corporate is not managed in the right manner, so much that it’s mandatory to elect a committee in order to make the day to day decisions. The committee is appointed at each annual general meeting (either thorough election or nomination), and it’s generally made up of Chairman, Treasurer, Secretary, etc.
An excellent way to think about it is that the committee resembles the Board of Directors. They are elected, have certain powers, and as long as they act within the realms of the rules, they are allowed to do what’s needed to ensure your building is in good repair and safe.
The Benefits of Having a Body Corporate Manager
The body corporate can ideally hire an external manager for their scheme. These are generally known as a body corporate or strata managers and help with the administrative aspects of the property.
The strata can delegate some or all of its powers to the body corporate manager and this is outlined in an agreement between the strata manager and committee. The body corporate manager takes on the role of guidance in making the best decisions for the property and usually know about the best service individuals in the region if needed.
Having a body corporate manager can ideally be of great importance when it comes to day to day tasks.
These duties include:
- Helping with accounting and bookkeeping, which ensures an accountable and clean budget.
- Dealing with complaints
- Dealing with the concerns and queries of owners, taking minutes, keeping records, sending notices, etc.
- Help with insurance requirements and communicate with insurance firms on behalf of the corporate body.
- Liaise with tenants, property owners, neighbors, conveyancers, sales agents and neighbours as needed.
- Deal with the repairs and maintenance of the building. They help by guiding the body corporate committee on who to hire when repairs are needed.
Having an objective body corporate manager on board helps take most of these burdens from the committee. They ideally help with decision making so that the committee can avoid making costly mistakes. As such, it is always worth considering hiring one for your strata.
