Self-management is rising, and it's a verdict on the strata industry

A Guardian feature has put a spotlight on the owners quietly walking away from their strata managers — and on the loss of trust that is driving them to it.

A feature published in the Guardian on 28 Jun 2026 has drawn attention to a movement most of the strata sector would rather ignore: owner-occupiers sacking their paid managers and running their own buildings. Written by Stephanie Convery, the piece traces her own path from a leaking roof and an absent manager to self-administering her five-unit Melbourne block, and sets that story against a wider collapse of confidence in commercial strata management.

The numbers are striking. In Victoria, only complexes above 100 occupiable lots are required by law to appoint a manager — about 1% of schemes nationally. Eighty-four per cent have ten lots or fewer, and by industry estimates roughly 40% of complexes already self-manage. Yet these owners remain near-invisible in a system that has come to treat professional management as the default rather than a choice.

Much of the discontent is cultural as well as financial. Adam Promnitz, who co-founded the Strata Owners Alliance in 2019 after sacking his own manager, argues that many owners are told they need a manager when they don't, and that parts of the industry behave as though they run the building rather than serve it. His line is blunt: managers, he says, "actually work for the owners". The alliance began as a Facebook group and is now a registered charity, built on the idea that owners who share knowledge can administer their own corporations perfectly well.

The reporting leans on a recent Victorian government review of the Owners Corporations Act, and the picture it paints is not flattering. Submissions described large insurance commissions, undisclosed financial ties between managers and brokers or contractors, unlawful fees, and records and funds withheld after contracts had ended. They also described "proxy-farming" — harvesting absent owners' proxy votes to steer meeting outcomes. The review found declining consumer confidence across a sector serving an estimated 1.27 million Victorians, with only 11% of surveyed owners believing the law ensured their managers acted honestly. Enforcement was thin: weak compliance activity, tribunal cases averaging 23 weeks, and barely half of them resolved.

Self-management is no cure-all, and the article is careful to say so. It recounts a Sydney owner who discovered, after buying into a 1930s walk-up, that almost every other owner was an investor with no interest in maintaining the building — and that repair reports estimating millions in water-damage work had never made it into the strata papers her conveyancer reviewed. Taking back control meant compiling evidence, unseating the committee and standing for it herself. The building is now on a sustainable repair footing, but the fight cost her dearly. Sometimes the problem is the manager; sometimes it is the other owners.

For the sector, the piece is uncomfortable reading, and deliberately so. The industry's main lobby group, the Strata Community Association, has argued for making managers mandatory for Victorian schemes above ten lots — while its state branch reportedly listed owners' groups among the "threats" in its own strategic plan. That tension, between an industry protecting its footprint and owners seeking control over their largest shared asset, sits at the centre of the story.

What the movement exposes is not that management is unnecessary. It is that the conflicts built into the commercial model have eroded trust to the point where owners would rather take on the work themselves than keep paying for it. That is the gap Acacia was built to close. As Australia's first member-owned strata management collective, Acacia removes the incentives the Guardian piece catalogues — the insurance commissions, the broker relationships, the sense that the manager answers to someone other than the people who pay it. Members keep professional management without surrendering control of it. The choice need not be between doing everything yourself and being quietly worked against.

The statutes named in the reporting are Victorian and New South Wales; South Australia runs its own regime under the Strata Titles Act 1988 and the Community Titles Act 1996, with its own history and its own quirks. But the underlying problem is national: too many owners are paying for a service that works against them, and the appetite for a better model is only growing.

Source: Stephanie Convery, "Unit owners are wresting back control of their stratas", The Guardian, 28 Jun 2026 — https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/28/unit-owners-stratas-australia