With the changes to Community title under the new Community Land Management Act 2021 and the Community Land Development Act 2021 implemented on 1 December 2021, now is a good time to ensure that you as a strata manager have a full understanding of the changes prior to attending and facilitating Annual General Meetings with your community title managements.
The changes, generally, have brought the community management legislation in line with the previously changed strata management legislation and should make it somewhat easier for strata managers to be able to have consistent answers for questions from owners. It is also important to do a check of all your meeting documentation to ensure that your templates have all been updated to meet the latest requirements.
This updating process also includes your Strata Management Agency Agreements. If you are heading to a meeting and your management term is on the agenda, it is essential that you ensure your office has the most updated agreements available. If your agreement is one drafted prior to the implementation date and you are signing it post 1 December 2021, it could put your management (and specifically your management fees) in question.
If your office is subscribed to a strata client management system, these documents should already have been provided for you – so it’s simply a matter of double checking that your documents are the most recent versions and that if you have favourites or frequently used documents saved to your desktop, that these have also been updated to correctly reflect the most recent legislative requirements.
If your office has developed their own template documents, an internal audit should be conducted to ensure that the correct clauses are referenced and terminology that has been changed is also reflected in those documents. Terminology such as ‘caretakers’ is now referred to as ‘Facility Mangers’ and ‘Capital Works Fund’ has now been adopted to reference the ‘Sinking Fund’, in line with the strata changes of 2016.
Additional changes to remember include: