South African Managers discuss Strata Scheme Service Issues

It’s Amazing !  You can travel half way around the world and what happens in strata hardly changes.

In a recent discussion forum in the Body Corporate Management Group on Linkedin (hosted by Mike Spencer from South Africa) a number of participants discussed how (and why) two strata schemes changed manager even though nothing had gone wrong, the schemes were running fine and the existing manager had not done anything particularly bad.

Interestingly, the following comments were made by the group members.

• Strata schemes only want to change their managers when they are unhappy with their current management
• A typical problem strata schemes encounter is lack of understanding by the manager about what the owners want
• In most cases changes result from a lack of real communication by the manager to owners
• Often there are no real problems in strata scheme operation (or at least no serious problems) but small things escalate
• Sometimes it’s because strata scheme committees are comprised of people who are not trained or informed, trying to run multi-million dollar real estate assets
• It’s difficult to deal with people with different mindsets
• Usually only a couple of people do all the work on strata scheme committee and the rest sit back and complain

So it seems to me that there are some simple lessons for managers out of this short discussion as follows.

1. The few people who drive strata scheme committees are they key to staying as manager … so it’s necessary to manage them and their expectations.
2. Whilst most owners are apathetic, when they do become interested it is usually to complain … so expect that and be ready to handle (and resolve) the complaints before they get momentum.
3. Regular and useful communication (of good and bad news) is very important, but not necessarily enough on it’s own to surviving as manager.
4. Try to understand what owners and strata scheme committee members really want (which is not always the same as what they say they want) and try to deliver it.
5. Don’t let issues that are relatively minor in the strata scheme of things get out of hand so that they become a reason to change managers.
6. And finally, since there will always be an underlying level of strata scheme manager changes (business churn) ... learn from what goes wrong and replace lost strata schemes with better clients.

See you at the next general meeting when they vote about changing strata manager.

Francesco …