No Fault Strata Owner Apathy

If you're reading this you're a minority of the people in Strataland - those who are interested in knowing more, doing better and participating in their strata ownership, work and business.  So, congratulations!

But what about the silent strata minority?

We always hear complaints about strata owner apathy. It's endemic and we can't understand why so many owners take so little interest. For a long time that led us to simply feel confused and dissappointed. But, nowadays sentiments are changing and people are starting to get angry at apathetic owners, blame them for strata problems and feel that they deserve the (bad) outcomes that low engagement often causes. 

That's a shame and we need to resist the natural temptations to further alienate non participating strata owners.

In this short article by Matthew Peake of Thiinkstrata called Don't Confuse Lack of Participation with a Lack of Caring, he defends missing strata owners; arguing that not participating doesn't mean they don't care.  I'm sure he's right.  


In fact, I'd argue that we should reverse our focus on this issue to find out why strata owners don't participate and look at what we do and don't do that causes this. 


After all, the current situation is the result of what we've done in the past and maybe we should be doing something different? Like some of these ideas.

• Offering more options for strata owner participation rather than traditional (and boring) meetings
• Providing more (and more interesting) information for strata owners
• More visibly connecting strata owners' actions (or omissions) to their strata outcomes (good and bad)
• Demonstrating options and outcomes for strata owners by comparisons and with benchmarks

I know that none of these things are guaranteed, that they'll take time and effort and that many initiatives will criticised.  But so what?  If we don't do it, who will?  And, if more strata owners don't participate things will only get worse.

Francesco ...