20 August 2026
Most committees who sack their strata manager didn’t need to.
That’s a strange thing for a strata manager to write down, so here’s the reasoning behind it.
Changing agents costs a lot more than the difference in the fee. Whoever takes over has to learn your building from scratch. The history, the defects, the contractors who actually turn up, who’s who on the committee, and the thing that happened three years ago that everybody still remembers and nobody wrote down. That takes the better part of a year. If you’re partway through remedial works it takes longer, and it costs you real money, because continuity on a job like that is worth more than most people realise until they lose it.
What a handover actually looks like
The books and records come across. That much is straightforward, at least in principle.
What doesn’t come across is everything that was never written down. Which owner will ring you at seven on a Sunday and which one won’t ring at all until it’s serious. Which contractor does a proper job and which one quotes low and finds problems later. Why the committee decided against the cheaper waterproofing option in 2019, and whether that decision still makes sense. Why the roof was only half done.
A good handover recovers some of that. It never recovers all of it, and the parts it misses tend to be the parts that matter when something goes wrong.
So before you go to market, it’s worth being honest about what the actual problem is.
The reasons that aren’t reasons
Your levies went up. That budget was approved by the owners at a general meeting. Ask to see the estimates it was built from before you decide the manager is at fault. If the answer is insurance, and it usually is, a new agent isn’t going to change your premium.
One bad interaction. Everybody has a bad week. Us included. If it’s a pattern, that’s different, but one email that landed badly isn’t a pattern.
Nothing is getting decided. This is the one we see most often and the one a change of manager least often fixes. If your committee can’t reach agreement, a new agent walks into the same room with the same people and the same disagreement. We’ve watched it not work.
You’ve been with them a long time and it feels stale. Longevity on its own isn’t a fault. Sometimes it means nothing has gone wrong.
The reasons that are
We’d say all of this even if it meant losing a client, because it’s the same list we’d want applied to us.
You can’t get an answer. Not slow, which happens to everyone in a bad month. Absent. Emails that go nowhere, calls that don’t come back, questions that never quite get resolved.
The records are a mess and nobody can explain how they got that way. Missing minutes, a compliance register that doesn’t match reality, invoices nobody can account for. Disorganisation is one thing. An inability to explain it is another.
You’re being charged for things nobody mentioned. Not the fee itself, which you agreed to, but the additions that appear afterwards. If you’re regularly surprised by an invoice, that’s a disclosure problem, not a pricing one.
They don’t tell you the bad news. This is the serious one and it matters more than the rest put together. You’ll get the news eventually. It just costs more by the time it reaches you, and by then the cheap option has usually gone. A manager who only tells you what you want to hear isn’t protecting you from anything. They’re deferring it, and adding interest.
If you do decide to move
You’ll need a resolution at a general meeting to appoint a new agent, so this isn’t a decision you make on a Tuesday and act on by Friday. Give yourself the time to do it properly.
And when you’re talking to agencies, ask better questions than the ones about price.
How many schemes does the person actually managing our building look after? Will that person be at our meetings, or will we be dealing with someone else? Do you take commissions on our insurance? What’s included in the fee and what gets billed separately, in writing? What happens when something goes wrong at six on a Friday evening?
Then ask to speak to two of their current clients. Almost nobody does this, and the reaction to being asked tells you nearly as much as the answer.
Read the list above honestly. If your manager comes out of it alright, stay where you are. If they don’t, speak to three agencies, ask the hard questions, and don’t choose on price alone.
John Martin, Founder and Managing Director, Bettr Strata