18 July 2026
A prospective client told me last week that their previous strata manager was carrying around 80 plans. One person.
I’ve no reason to doubt them, and honestly, whether it’s eighty or sixty doesn’t change the point. The number is a symptom. The model behind it is the cause. But sit with it for a moment anyway. Eighty owners corporations. Eighty budgets, eighty insurance renewals, eighty sets of compliance deadlines that don’t move, hundreds of owners, thousands of emails. One human being.
I know what that number means, because I was on the inside of the model that produces it. If you’re ever choosing a strata manager, that number is one of the most important things you can ask about, and almost nobody does.
I’m not writing this as an outsider
Let me be clear about where I’m standing before I criticise anything. I spent years in corporate strata, including in leadership. I made the exact trade-off I’m about to pull apart. I sat in the rooms where it was decided. That isn’t a confession, it’s the reason I can speak to this with any authority at all. I’m not lobbing stones from outside. I’m telling you what it looks like from the inside, because I was there.
What to know when choosing a strata manager: the 80-plan problem
The first thing that dies at that volume is proactive work. All of it. A manager on that many plans isn’t managing, they’re triaging. They aren’t preventing problems, they’re reacting to whichever one is loudest today. The quiet schemes, the ones without a fire this week, get nothing. Not because the manager doesn’t care, but because there’s no time left once the fires are out. So the quiet scheme stays quiet right up until it becomes the emergency, and then it joins the queue.
That is not a failing of the manager. Put anyone behind that many plans and they’ll drown. It’s a decision made above them.
But don’t they have teams behind them?
Here’s the fair pushback, and it’s the one the directors of those businesses will make. “Our managers aren’t doing it all alone. They’ve got accounting teams, compliance teams, maintenance teams behind them. The number is misleading.”
It’s a fair point, and it’s true. There is real support behind a manager in a large firm, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But it misses what the owner actually experiences. That manager is still answerable to 80 committees. They are still the face of the business to every owner in that portfolio. When an owner has a problem, they don’t call the accounting team or the compliance team. They call their manager. And their manager is one of 80 conversations that person is trying to hold in their head.
Owners don’t care how the meal is made. They don’t want to hear about the kitchen, the suppliers, the systems out the back. They want a five-star meal every time they sit down, served by someone who knows them and has time for them. A brilliant kitchen doesn’t help if the one waiter is running eighty tables at once. The plates still come out cold.
The teams are real. So is the bottleneck. And the bottleneck is the person the owner actually deals with.
I made peace with that decision for too long
I managed good people who were drowning. Genuinely good managers, stretched too thin, doing their absolute best and still unable to give each scheme what it deserved. I could see it happening. I wanted to fix it. And I was often powerless to, because the numbers didn’t allow it that quarter.
It was fighting a bushfire with a garden hose.
So I’ll be fair, because I’ve sat in that chair. Lots per manager versus the cost of another full-time person is a genuinely hard equation. I don’t believe most directors are choosing profit over people out of greed. Most of them, if the numbers allowed, would put on staff tomorrow. Sometimes the sums just don’t work, and service is what gives, because service is the part that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet straight away. It shows up eighteen months later, in a scheme that quietly fell apart while nobody had time to look.
I understand the bind. I just stopped being willing to live inside it.
Adding people isn’t the only lever
Here’s the part I wish I’d understood earlier. When a manager is overloaded, the instinct is that the only fix is another salary, and when the budget won’t stretch, you’re stuck. But headcount isn’t the only lever. The other one is time. You can give a manager their day back by getting everything around them right.
That starts with the software. I built Bettr Strata on Stratafy rather than fighting the dated systems much of the industry still runs on. That wasn’t a small choice. The platform a manager works in either hands them time or quietly steals it all day, in a hundred small frictions that add up to hours. The right system means less time wrestling the tool and more time doing the work.
Then it’s process, and sensible use of technology, including AI, for the repetitive administrative work that eats hours and adds nothing. None of that replaces good management. It removes the friction that made the job impossible, and hands the time back to the part that actually matters: looking after buildings and the people in them.
What “managed properly” looks like
Take onboarding, because it’s where the difference is starkest. When I take on a scheme, I don’t sign the agreement and switch the records over. I do a forensic review of the books and records first: the financial position, the compliance status, every matter the previous manager left open, including the things nobody flagged because flagging them was inconvenient. That becomes a plain-language written summary for the committee, so they can finally see the true state of their own scheme.
Then I walk the building. All of it. Not a drive-by, not a photo from the car. The plant rooms, the roof space, the common property people forget exists until it fails. And I meet the committee before I quote, because you can’t price or manage a scheme you’ve never stood in front of.
A manager on 80 plans can’t do this. There’s no time. So it doesn’t happen, and the new scheme inherits every problem nobody had time to find.
What poor service quietly costs owners
The cost is invisible until it isn’t. It costs money, a scheme that isn’t watched misses the chance to challenge a premium or plan capital works properly, and pays more across the board. It costs the committee time and stress, because they end up doing the manager’s chasing for them. It costs compliance, deadlines slide, and a missed obligation becomes a liability. And most of all, small problems become big ones. A minor defect ignored becomes a major repair. A quiet maintenance issue becomes a special levy nobody saw coming. Almost every expensive strata disaster started as a small, cheap problem no one had time to deal with.
Poor service doesn’t feel expensive in the moment. That’s exactly the trap. The bill comes later, and it’s always bigger.
My position, plainly
I will sacrifice profit for service every time. Every time. This isn’t charity, a capped portfolio run properly is a perfectly sound business. It just isn’t a greedy one. And I make the choice because I know the rest takes care of itself once the service is right.
The average person doesn’t care about the challenges of your day. They don’t want to hear about your workload or your systems. They want to call you and have you answer. Send an email and get a reply. And know that when you turn up to the meeting about their single biggest investment, you’re prepared and you’re at your best. That’s the whole job. Everything else is in service of it.
So I cap my portfolio deliberately, and low. Low enough that every scheme gets a real relationship, not a place in a queue. When I’m full and a good scheme comes calling, I tell them the truth, not yet, and point them to someone good. Turning away work I can’t service to my standard isn’t a limitation of the model. It is the model.
A committee I look after put it better than I can
“You are available. I call, you answer. I write, you answer. We have a problem, you provide a solution. You give us the right advice, sometimes what we don’t want to hear, and you empower us to make the decision. We gave up on our last strata manager. Emails weren’t answered. There was no point calling. Of all the things you do, most of all, you are there. And that is rare.”
Read that last line again. That is rare.
Being available should be the floor. The absolute least a manager owes the people paying them. That it has become a point of difference tells you exactly how far the bar has fallen.
The fair questions, answered head-on
A boutique model has trade-offs, and the honest thing is to name them.
Can I match a big firm’s resources on paper? No. But resources on paper and service in practice are very different things. An overloaded manager with a big brand behind them isn’t out-serving a capped portfolio. Scale buys a logo, not attention.
Is a boutique a single point of failure? It’s a fair question, and I’ve built for it rather than hoped around it. Licensed locum managers are in place for any extended absence, and I’m deliberately building the depth of the business as it grows, so that a scheme never rests on one person. Depth is the goal, not doors. Growing the team to protect service is the exact opposite of growing the portfolio to chase margin. The cap stays. The bench gets deeper.
Strata is simple. We make it hard.
I use that line a lot, and I mean it. Most of the confusion around strata isn’t the subject. It’s that the industry has made it distant, complicated, and hard to get a straight answer from. None of that is necessary. I left corporate strata because I was tired of making peace with a trade-off I didn’t believe in, and I built something where answering the phone, walking the building, and giving a damn aren’t luxuries the budget can’t afford. They’re the entire point.
So if you’re choosing a strata manager, ask the simple question first: how many plans do you carry? The answer tells you almost everything.
Keep It Simple Strata. The (new) KISS method.
John Martin (JM) | Founder & Managing Director | Bettr Strata