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Competent or not, honest or not, the Body Corporate manager will never apply the same level of due diligence than the OC/SC for a very simple reason: it’s not his money!!!
And he is just one person, managing dozens of buildings, so he will always tend to lean towards convenience. In a medium-size building, there are dozens of owners.
Being able to tap that impressive combined skill set is what we want to achieve by enabling people to get involved conveniently, online.
100% delegation may be convenient, but don’t expect optimal results and value for money…
Thanks Jimmy!
At Stratabox, we promote transparency in the administration and communications, but also continuity of the records, so when the SC is renewed or the Strata Manager changes, all the history remains intact.
Happy to discuss scheme specific situations and requirements, just get in touch, contact@stratabox.com.au
I’m not sure we can talk about a trailing commission. A commission will be paid to the SM regardless of whether you renew with the same insurer or a different one, every year.
The origin of this commission was that the Strata Manager acted as an intermediary by facilitating the quoting and claims management. It allowed them to quote a lower “per lot” management fee to the scheme and appear more competitive, but it slowly became essential to their budgets. Most managing agreements stipulate that should insurance be sourced independently from the SM, the management fee will increase by an amount equivalent to the foregone insurance commission.
Since the new legislation, 3 quotes need to be sourced and most SMs rely on brokers to do the legwork for them. The broker charges a fee, but ALSO gets a commission from the insurer, that is then shared with the SM. The broker’s fee and SM commission have to be disclosed, but not the broker’s commission. The brokers usually only provide general advice which doesn’t require huge amounts of work and has limited value.
Hi Flame Tree, that was the thinking behind creating Stratabox.
Getting along with neighbours is fantastic, but you may not want to share your holiday pics with them…
Happy to answer your questions of give you a demo, contact@stratabox.com.au
Happy to give you a demo of Stratabox, which includes push email but also keeps an archive on the site, as well as segregated access to Residents, Owners and SC members. You can also share admin privileges between several people, but once the initial setup is done, maintenance is minimal. We now have over 60 buildings using it and it has really helped them with engagement.
There is little sense in every single scheme reinventing the wheel on this when you can get purpose-built, enterprise grade software to do it for you.
Scale also enables us to innovate as well as ensuring maximum levels of security including encryption, intrusion detection and regular backups.
I know this is quite an old post, but don’t hesitate to check us out if you want to improve your communications and administration.
LawoftheLand, you are definitely not alone in this situation. We get a lot of customers explaining how dysfunctional the management of their building is with general apathy and total lack of interest from investors. This can only end in tears with costs blowouts or buildings slowly falling in disrepair.We hope that we can help reconnect people so the situation improves. And you are correct, with the large number of buildings going up, it will become a major issue. I recently saw AGM papers for a 300 lot building with attendance of just 3…From the situation you describe, it may be time for you to look at changing Strata Management company! And if you’d like to improve your communications and administration processes, we’d love to help!
Hi Helen, why not try opening lines of communication between the residents of your scheme instead? I doubt everybody is behaving badly, and sometimes people are not aware of the rules and don’t act intentionally? I am certain most of the residents in your building would appreciate an improvement to the current situation?
Hi Rhea,
I am not overly familiar with it, but there is a functionality to export results in Survey Monkey:
https://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/Exports
I think in any case if you push the your Treasurer into a corner there is a risk the situation will deteriorate. But it my be necessary as there is no place for autocratic behaviour in an OC/SC, and he’s otherwise likely to keep using the same process to justify anything he likes!
Just like votes at an AGM are generally public, any survey that is non sensitive should be transparent to everyone.
9. Longevity of their frontline staff
10. Number of schemes/lots per manager