7 May 2026
There was a piece in the Illawarra Mercury today about the race for Wollongong’s tallest building.
Three contenders, all over 38 storeys. The Bunnings site alone is now planned for 1,500 apartments across six towers – three of those at 40 storeys. Add Crown Square, the twin 26-storey towers at Crown and Gladstone, Skye Wollongong, and the rest of the pipeline, and Wollongong’s residential strata footprint is about to change in a way most of the city hasn’t fully registered.
Growth is good. The housing is needed. The question isn’t whether to build, it’s how the city sets up the buildings, and the people who’ll live in them, for the long term.
A few observations, from someone who works in strata and spends a lot of time in Wollongong in my capacity as a strata manager.
When several thousand new strata lots come online in a regional market over the next decade, the people who buy them, owner-occupiers and investors alike, automatically become members of an owners corporation. Most will move into a building managed, by default, by whoever the developer appointed during the initial period. That appointment ends automatically at the first annual general meeting. At that meeting, usually within months of settlement, the owners corporation votes on who manages the scheme. They can re-appoint the developer’s agent, choose a different one, or run a competitive process. A lot of owners don’t realise the appointment is theirs to make until they’re sitting in the room. By then the relationship with the developer’s agent is established and the rhythms are set.
Towers of this scale also sit at the upper end of NSW strata complexity. A 270-apartment building has different governance, different compliance load, and a different operational rhythm than a 12-unit walk-up. The framework that works for a small block doesn’t scale up cleanly. Most of the people advising buyers about strata management at the point of purchase are the developer’s marketing people, not independent advisors.
Which brings me to the part of this conversation worth raising directly with developers.
Most developers apply serious due diligence to the decisions that shape a project – site selection, builder appointment, architect, financier, planning consultant. The strata management appointment that carries through the initial period and into the first AGM is a decision in the same category, and it doesn’t always get the same rigour.
When I take on a new scheme that’s twelve months past handover, especially a larger scheme that looks great on a BDM’s sales document, I see the same pattern. The setup work that should have been done – proper records, complete asset registers, a defensible budget, by-laws drafted with care, a working capital works plan – has been done at half the depth it needed. The owners corporation starts on the back foot from day one.
The reasons are structural. Developer-side business development teams, often, not always, without strata experience themselves, are involved in selling the scheme and shaping early commitments. Promises get made and arrangements get locked in without a clear understanding of what those decisions mean for an owners corporation over the short, medium, and long term. The strata manager appointed by the developer often inherits commitments rather than driving them.
The opportunity to set a scheme up properly happens once. Missing it costs owners for years, and reflects on the building, and by extension on the developer who built it. A building that develops a reputation for governance problems three years in is a building that’s harder to sell into for the developer’s next project.
The argument is straightforward: the same due diligence that applies to choosing the right site, the right builder, and the right architect applies to choosing the right strata manager. The appointment shapes the next decade of how the building runs. It deserves the same rigour as the decisions that came before it.
There’s another part of this that goes beyond strata.
The infrastructure that supports Wollongong now wasn’t built for what’s coming. Parking is already a pressure point. Traffic on the main arterials at peak hour is already a pressure point. Public transport capacity, school catchment, hospital load, and the basic services side of city life all get harder when you add tens of thousands of new residents in a concentrated geography. None of that is a reason not to build. The housing is needed. But the conversation about how the city handles the load needs to be happening now, not in 2030 when the towers are topped out and the residents have moved in.
That’s a conversation for council, for state government, for community groups, for residents, and for the developers themselves. A community-led approach to what Wollongong becomes over the next decade is more useful now than a reactive one later. The people who live here have a right to be in that conversation, and the time to be in it is before the design decisions are baked.
For owners moving into these new towers: the developer’s strata appointment is a starting point, not a settlement. You have a say at the first AGM. Use it.
For committees in existing Wollongong schemes: the city you’re managing in is changing fast. Service expectations from the new buildings will lift the bar for everyone. That’s useful pressure.
I’m for the buildings. I want them to work for the people who’ll spend the next 30 years living in them. The strata side of that, and the civic infrastructure around it, both belong in the conversation alongside the height and the design.
JM
Founder + Managing Director
Bettr Strata