15 June 2026
I get asked, more than you’d think, whether Bettr Strata is for sale. Whether I’d come “into the tent” of a bigger group. Whether I’d take on the strata arm of a real estate firm and scale it up.
The answer’s no. Not because the offers aren’t flattering, but because scaling up isn’t why I built this.
I could press go tomorrow and chase volume like many do. The model’s well worn. Take on as many lots as the spreadsheet allows, allocate managers by lot count, and let the economics do the rest. It works, in the sense that it makes money. It works even better if you take a commission on the insurance, or sit a related brokerage in the background so the benefit comes in that way while the headline still reads “no commissions.” That’s a model too. It just isn’t mine.
But here’s what the volume model does to the actual job.
When a manager’s portfolio runs to hundreds of lots across dozens of schemes, every individual building gets a thinner slice of them. That’s not a character flaw in the manager. Most of them are good people working hard inside a model that keeps loading more on. It’s arithmetic. There are only so many hours, and the more lots you stack on one person, the less of that person any single scheme gets. The volume model isn’t a scandal. But it is a choice, and owners rarely get told it’s been made on their behalf.
I made the opposite choice. I cap what I take on, deliberately. Fewer schemes, more of me in each one. I’m the one who actually knows your building. I’m at your meeting. I’m the one who answers when something goes wrong at an hour when nobody wants the phone to ring. That isn’t a feature I bolt on. It’s the whole design.
And it’s why I don’t move on price.
Plenty of managers will do the dance with you. Quote a number, let you push back, shave a bit off, throw something in. I won’t. My price is my price. The agreement is the agreement. Not because I’m inflexible for the sake of it, but because the price reflects the way I work, and the way I work is the entire point. Drop the price and something has to give to make the maths work, and the thing that gives is attention. I’m not willing to trade that, so I won’t pretend otherwise.
I know that means I’m not for everyone. If the cheapest headline number is what matters most, I’m not your manager, and I’ll tell you so honestly. There are businesses who’ll meet you there, who’ll chase the work at almost any price and promise to be everything to everyone. I made a different bet. That there are owners and committees who’d rather pay a fair, fixed price for someone who has the genuine capacity to care about their building.
I’m in this for the long game. So are the like-minded people I’ve watched do it the same way, some of them long before me. We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. We’re trying to do the job properly, at a scale where “properly” is actually possible.
That’s the business I wanted to build. So that’s the one I built.
John Martin (JM) | Founder & Managing Director | Bettr Strata