Having your body corporate scheme managed by a professional body corporate service is a wise move. Your body corporate manager will take care of all financial matters relating to the building, ensure legal requirements are met, oversee the maintenance and upkeep of your building and manage all community issues.
Sounds great – and it is when you use an experienced and competent body corporate management service. It’s an efficient and cost-effective way for owners to rid themselves of all the stress and hassle associated with managing a strata building. You can expect that using body corporate services will lead to a safer, more efficient and ultimately more pleasant place to live.
Here are more specific details about what you can expect when you hire a body corporate management service.
Here’s what you can expect your body corporate manager to do
A body corporate manager is responsible for all of the administrative aspects of the scheme. You can expect your body corporate manager to:
- Resolve disputes between lot owners, and between lot owners and tenants
- Facilitate budget setting
- Collect body corporate levies
- Manage day-to-day paperwork, keep records and send notices
- Assist with financial planning
- Maintain financial statements
- Organise AGMs and special general meetings, and take minutes at these meetings
- Organise insurance cover
- Submit insurance claims and process paperwork
- Schedule repairs and maintenance
- Schedule essential services as necessary
- Schedule grounds maintenance
- Provide advice regarding public liability issues
- Ensure the building’s facilities are always maintained in good condition
- Ensure the building presents no danger to anyone on the premises
You can also expect
- Time saved. The use of body corporate management services will save lot owners an enormous amount of time and effort that goes towards managing a building.
- Money saved. It may seem counterintuitive to talk about saving money, as surely hiring body corporate management services will cost money! While that’s true,
- there’s a good chance it will actually save money for the body corporate, by ensuring levies are paid on time and managing financial tasks much more effectively. It’s a false economy to try and manage without body corporate services, as you’ll often end up paying more by trying to go it alone.
- Stress saved. There’s a lot of work and angst involved in managing a building, and a body corporate manager can make that vanish by taking care of all those demanding tasks for you.
Relationships saved. Disputes are inevitable in a group of diverse people trying to live together, and can end up destroying relationships. A body corporate manager can help maintain good relationships between members of a body corporate and can deal with sensitive tasks far better than someone who lives in the building.
Here’s what you CAN’T expect your body corporate manager to do:
- Take charge of your body corporate committee. The body corporate manager doesn’t actually make decisions for the body corporate, but only acts at the direction of the committee. They are more like a personal assistant than a manager who “runs” the building.
- Vote on body corporate decisions. The body corporate manager is automatically a member of the body corporate committee, but they cannot vote on decisions made by the committee. The committee will make decisions, and the body corporate manager will see that they are carried out – they have no role to play in making those decisions, however.
- Be a property manager. Body corporate manager and property manager are two separate roles, and they don’t overlap. The difference lies in who they work for. The body corporate manager is responsible for looking after the building and body corporate scheme as a whole; whereas a property manager looks after an individual property on behalf of that property’s owner. The body corporate manager works on behalf of all owners, not just one owner.
- Enforce strata by-laws or deal with by-law breaches. The body corporate manager is not the “strata police” and is not authorised to enforce by-laws or deal with breaches of the by-laws. The body corporate committee looks after this task – and they cannot delegate this to the body corporate manager.
The upshot, is that you can expect body corporate management services to look after your building expertly and professionally, relieving owners of the burden of doing so. If you need body corporate management services, Capitol BCA is the leader in body corporate management. Get in contact here.