Seven guides for South Australian strata and community title owners

Most people become a strata or community title owner without ever being handed an explanation of what that means. You get a contract, a levy notice, and a set of obligations nobody walks you through. Somewhere down the track a decision arrives about who manages the corporation, and there is no obvious way to compare one manager against another, because almost nothing about how strata management works is written down anywhere a normal person would find it.

So we wrote it down. Seven guides, free to download, no email address required, and yours to circulate to your committee or your neighbours.

They are South Australian, and that matters more than it sounds

Strata and community title are governed state by state. South Australia has two separate Acts, the Strata Titles Act 1988 and the Community Titles Act 1996, and they differ from the equivalents interstate in ways that change the answer, not just the wording. A guide written for New South Wales will tell a South Australian owner something confidently wrong about their own building.

Community title is also the more common form here, and it works differently from strata title in ways that catch people out: lot boundaries, common property, and lot subsidiaries such as carports and courtyards all behave differently. There is a separate guide for each, because merging them would have meant hedging both.

What is in the set

What you own, and what the corporation owns. This is the question sitting underneath most strata arguments, and most people have never seen it answered. Where does your unit stop and the common property start? Who pays when something on the line between the two fails? Both Acts define the boundary by reference to a wall or fence, and both guides quote the section rather than paraphrasing it.

What a body corporate manager is actually responsible for. Service by service, in plain terms. This one is worth having whether or not you are thinking of changing managers. It is the checklist to hold your current one against, and it will tell you fairly quickly whether the fee you pay is buying what you assumed it was.

What it costs. We published our fee schedule in full, including the incidental charges that usually appear on the second page of a quote. A committee can compare us against another manager's proposal without ringing up and asking for a number, which is how it should have worked all along.

Our Service Guarantee, which puts our commitments in writing, and who is behind the collective, which matters more than it usually would because we are member-owned.

Two of the seven are about us

That is deliberate, and it is worth being straight about. Five of these guides are about your building and would be worth reading if Acacia Collective did not exist. Two of them are about what we offer and what we charge.

We think that is the right ratio. An owner who understands what a manager is for is a harder person to sell to, and a considerably better one to work with. The alternative, an information gap that a manager quietly benefits from, is most of what is wrong with this industry.

Get them

All seven are on our guides page, free and ungated.

If you would rather have them on paper, a printed set is easier to hand around a committee meeting than a folder of PDFs. There is a form on the same page: tell us where to send it and one will go in the post, also free.