1 September 2026
Part of my work is section 237 appointments. That’s the point where NCAT decides an owners corporation can’t run itself and appoints a managing agent under orders. Levies, insurance, maintenance, meetings, all of it, taken out of the owners’ hands. It’s strata’s version of putting a company into administration.
Schemes usually reach me through a lawyer, or referred by someone who’s watched an appointment happen nearby. By the time they do, nobody involved thinks it happened suddenly. The warning signs were visible years before anyone filed an application, and the files all tell the same story.
The AGM quietly stops happening. Not cancelled, just not held. One year slips into three, and the scheme stops making decisions at all. Everything else compounds from here, because there’s no forum left to fix anything in.
Nobody can produce the records. Ask for the financials, the insurance certificate, the strata roll, and the answer is a shrug or a shoebox. A scheme that can’t show you its records usually doesn’t have them.
Arrears become normal. A few owners fund the building while others pay nothing, and nobody takes recovery action, because the people who’d authorise it are the people in arrears. This one is the strongest predictor of the rest.
Maintenance only happens as emergency. Nothing is planned, so everything is urgent. The roof gets patched the week it fails, at whatever price the day demands. The capital works fund, where one exists, holds a few thousand dollars against a building that needs far more.
The committee shrinks to one person. Exhausted or entrenched, sometimes both. Decisions get made in a hallway or not at all, and every attempt to join or question the committee dies quietly.
None of these is fatal on its own. Every scheme misses an AGM eventually, and plenty of buildings run fine on lean committees. It’s the combination and the duration that do the damage. Two of these for three years is a scheme drifting toward an application somebody will eventually make. Usually an owner who has run out of patience. Sometimes a creditor.
The appointments themselves are serious work. The agent arrives with orders and every decision gets documented to court standard, because the Tribunal is watching. The first year goes on rebuilding foundations: the first AGM in years, records reconstructed, arrears chased, deferred maintenance priced at today’s cost. It’s slow and unglamorous, and being trusted with it is a privilege. Handing a scheme back to owners in a state where they can run it themselves is some of the most worthwhile work I do.
It’s also mostly avoidable. Strip any of these schemes back and the missing part was never money or luck. It was leadership. Somebody willing to hold the meeting, chase the debt, tell owners the roof needs a levy and not another patch, and be briefly unpopular for all of it.
If some of this reads like your building, the fix is still the cheap one. Hold the meeting. Produce the accounts. Have the hard conversation. If it’s gone past that, get advice early, because every month of drift gets priced into the rebuild.
The Tribunal is the expensive one.
John Martin, Founder and Managing Director, Bettr Strata