Strata Common Area Repair Services QLD 2026 - Pricing Guide - Get Quotes

What Strata Common Area Repairs Cost in Queensland

Waterproofing one balcony runs $3,500 to $12,000, and concrete spalling repair is $450 to $1,200 the square metre. Repainting the exterior of a three storey block sits between $35,000 and $95,000. Replacing the roof on a twelve unit block reaches $45,000 to $140,000. A structural engineer's inspection with a written report is $1,800 to $6,500, and a sinking fund forecast is $800 to $3,000.

Before any of those numbers means anything, one question settles who pays, and in this state the answer has nothing to do with where the damage shows up. It turns on the type of survey plan the scheme was registered under. Under a building format plan the boundary runs through the middle of the floor, the walls and the ceiling, which leaves the bulk of the structure in common property. Under a standard format plan the boundary is surveyed on the ground, so the building generally belongs to the lot owner even though it stands inside a community titles scheme.

That distinction sorts almost every dispute in this area and most owners have never heard of it. Two identical-looking townhouse complexes a street apart can have completely different answers to who fixes a leaking balcony, purely because one was registered as a building format plan and the other as a standard format plan. The community management statement and the survey plan together are the documents that settle it. Neither of them is hard to obtain, and both are routinely ignored while people argue from first principles instead.

Queensland handles the rest of this differently from the southern states as well. The governing framework is the Body Corporate and Community Management legislation, the money is held in an administrative fund and a sinking fund in place of a capital works fund, and a dispute starts with the Commissioner's office for conciliation and then adjudication before a tribunal becomes relevant at all. The sections below work through ownership, the maintenance obligation, the funds and spending limits, urgent repairs, disputes, insurance and storm damage, regional pricing, and the questions a quote has to answer. Our strata and body corporate plumbing and strata and body corporate painting pages cover the two trades most often engaged.

Building Format or Standard Format: The Question That Decides Everything

Every community titles scheme in Queensland is registered under a survey plan, and the type of plan sets the boundary between a lot and common property. There are three types in general use and the difference between the first two accounts for the overwhelming majority of confusion, argument and misdirected invoices in this area.

A building format plan defines boundaries by reference to the building itself, and the boundary runs through the centre of the floor, the walls and the ceiling. The practical effect is that the outer half of every external wall, the slab below the midpoint, the ceiling above it, the roof, the balcony structure and the windows in the external wall are all common property. This is the usual arrangement for apartment buildings and most walk-up unit blocks. If the scheme has a shared entry and units stacked above each other, this is almost certainly the plan type, and a quick check of the statement confirms it.

A standard format plan defines boundaries by surveyed land, marked on the ground the way an ordinary freehold lot is. The lot is the parcel of land, and anything built on it belongs to the lot , not the body corporate. In a standard format townhouse scheme the owner is generally responsible for their own roof, their own walls and their own slab, and the common property is the driveway, the gardens, the pool and the shared infrastructure. Owners in these schemes are often surprised by how little the body corporate covers. The compensation is lower levies and a good deal less argument. Each owner carries their own building and its maintenance history.

The third type is a volumetric format plan, which defines a three dimensional volume and appears in mixed use and layered developments. It is less common in residential schemes and the principle is the same: the plan defines the boundary and everything outside it is common property.

Knowing which plan applies is the first step in any repair conversation and it takes minutes. The community management statement for the scheme names the plan type, the body corporate manager holds it, and a title search produces it for a small fee. Any owner with a repair argument underway who does not know their plan type is arguing without the primary document in hand. It is not a difficult thing to obtain, and a body corporate manager will usually send it the same day.

Utility infrastructure has its own rule and it cuts across the plan type. Pipes, wiring, ducting and similar services that serve more than one lot are common property regardless of where they run, including where they pass through the inside of somebody's unit. A drain blockage in a stack serving six bathrooms is a body corporate matter even if the only visible symptom is in one apartment. The location of the pipe is irrelevant to who owns it, and what matters is how many lots it serves.

Exclusive use areas are the other complication and they are created by the community management statement. A balcony, a courtyard, a car space or a storage cage can be common property allocated to one lot for its exclusive use, and the by-law granting that right usually says who maintains it. Reading that by-law is the only way to know, because the allocation of maintenance responsibility varies from one scheme to the next. No default position exists to fall back on. The by-law is the answer and nothing else is. Committees that work from assumption on this get it wrong consistently.

Two items cause more arguments than everything else combined. Windows and doors in an external wall of a building format plan are common property for the structure, while the glass, the locks and the flyscreens are frequently dealt with differently by by-law. And waterproofing membranes under balcony and bathroom tiles sit below the finished surface, which puts them on the common property side of the line in a building format plan while the tiles above them may not be. That single detail accounts for a remarkable number of disputes. Reading the by-laws before the argument starts prevents most of it. Fifteen minutes with the statement is the cheapest intervention available.

The sensible first step for any owner or committee facing a repair is to get the documents out before getting the quotes in. The survey plan, the community management statement including the by-laws and any exclusive use allocations, and the most recent building or condition report together answer the ownership question in almost every case. Our building inspection page covers the condition assessment side of that work. Getting the documents first costs nothing and takes a week. Getting the quotes first can cost a committee its authority to pay for them. The order of operations is the whole of the governance point here.

Common Property Repair Rates by Item

The table below pairs each item with who usually bears the cost and which fund it normally comes from, because on a body corporate those two questions follow the item rather than the circumstances. Rates assume a south east Queensland scheme of moderate size with reasonable access. The usual-cost column states the common position under a building format plan, and a standard format plan shifts several of those lines to the lot owner instead. The figures do not change with the plan type, and only the question of who is invoiced does.

The fund column is the part committees most often get wrong and it matters for more than bookkeeping. Day to day repairs and maintenance come from the administrative fund, which is raised to cover the year's operating costs. Items that recur over a long cycle, such as repainting, roof replacement and lift modernisation, come from the sinking fund, which exists precisely so those costs do not arrive as special levies. That is the whole design intent of the fund. A scheme that treats it as a savings account has misunderstood it completely. The money is already committed to items that have been forecast.

Where a body corporate has no money in the sinking fund for an item that should have been forecast, the shortfall becomes a special levy on owners, and that is the single most common source of anger in Queensland schemes. At $800 to $3,000 the sinking fund forecast is the cheapest document mentioned anywhere on this page, and the one that prevents exactly this. Our painting services page covers the cyclical repaint that forecast is usually built around. A repaint cycle on a Queensland coastal building runs shorter than inland. The forecast should reflect the building's actual exposure and not a generic interval. A beachfront block and an inland block repaint on different cycles.

Access costs are absorbed into several of those lines and worth seeing separately on a quote. Working above the ground floor on a unit block means scaffold, an elevated platform, swing stage or rope access, and on a four storey building that access can exceed the cost of the repair it enables. That is also the strongest argument for bundling work, because doing the balcony membranes, the spalling and the repaint in one access campaign is dramatically cheaper than three separate ones. The access is the fixed cost and the repairs are the variable one. Committees that understand that order get far more done for the same money. It is the most useful single insight on this page for a treasurer.

Two lines in the table are ongoing rather than one-off and they belong in the budget rather than in a repair discussion. Garden and grounds maintenance and periodic pressure cleaning of common areas are recurring contracts, and our pressure cleaning page covers the latter. Bulk waste and hard rubbish removal at $400 to $2,500 sits in the same category in most schemes, and rubbish removal covers that work. Scheduling it quarterly rather than reactively costs less, and it also stops the bin area becoming a dumping ground between collections.

The Obligation to Maintain, and What It Actually Requires

A Queensland body corporate has a statutory duty to maintain common property in good condition, and that duty is stronger than many committees realise. It is not a discretion to be exercised when funds allow, and it is not satisfied by patching symptoms. The legislation and the regulation modules that sit under it can be read at Queensland Legislation. The relevant section is short and written plainly, and any committee member can read it in ten minutes.

The practical consequence is that a committee cannot defer a genuine maintenance item indefinitely because the levy increase would be unpopular. Where common property is deteriorating, where water is entering lots through common property, or where a structural element is failing, the obligation is to fix it. An owner affected by that failure has a path to compel it, which is covered further down this page. That path is real and it is used regularly. Committees that treat the duty as discretionary tend to discover this the expensive way. An adjudicator's order arrives with a timeframe attached to it.

The obligation also extends to utility infrastructure that serves more than one lot, which catches a surprising range of items. A shared sewer stack, the electrical submains, a common hot water plant, the stormwater system and the ducting for a central air conditioning arrangement are all common property maintenance even where they run inside somebody's unit. Our plumbing services page covers the trade that handles most of that. The common error is treating a stack blockage as the affected owner's problem. It never is, where that stack serves other lots as well. The owner with the symptom is simply the one who noticed.

Waterproofing is where this obligation bites hardest in Queensland and it is worth understanding why. A balcony or a bathroom has a membrane below the tiles, that membrane has a finite life measured in fifteen to twenty-five years, and when it fails the water goes into the slab, into the walls below and eventually into the unit underneath. By the time anybody sees a stain, the membrane has been failing for years already. Nothing gives early warning from inside the unit. By the time there is, the concrete below has been wet for a long while. Scheduled inspection is the only thing that finds it earlier.

Repairing it properly means taking the tiles up, removing the screed, reinstating the membrane to the current standard with a product from Ardex, Mapei, Crommelin or a comparable manufacturer, re-screeding and re-tiling, which is why the figure is $3,500 to $12,000 for one balcony , not a few hundred dollars. Sealing the tile grout from above, which is what gets proposed when a committee wants a cheap answer, does not address a failed membrane and buys at best a season. Our balcony waterproofing and repair page covers the work and waterproofing services covers the broader category. Doing every balcony on an elevation at once is far cheaper per balcony. Doing them one at a time as each owner complains is the expensive path. Access alone makes the difference between those two approaches substantial.

The standards that govern it are not optional and they have moved. Waterproofing of wet areas and external above-ground areas is covered by Australian standards called up through the National Construction Code, and the current requirements are more demanding than those in force when most Queensland walk-up blocks were built. The standards are available through Standards Australia and the code through the Australian Building Codes Board. Reinstating to the original 1980s detail is not an option, and the current standard applies to the new work.

Concrete spalling is the other long-running obligation and it is a coastal Queensland speciality. Chloride from salt air penetrates concrete over decades, reaches the reinforcing steel, and the rust that forms occupies several times the volume of the steel it replaced, which cracks the concrete off from inside. The visible symptom is a patch of concrete falling away with rusted steel behind it, and the cause has been running for twenty years. Nothing about spalling happens quickly, and the remediation does not reverse the chloride already in the concrete either.

Treating spalling as a cosmetic patching job is the expensive mistake. Doing it properly means cutting back to sound concrete beyond the corrosion, treating or replacing the steel, and reinstating with a proprietary repair mortar from Sika, Fosroc or Parchem designed for the purpose, because a patch that leaves chloride-contaminated concrete in place will fail again at its own edges. At $450 to $1,200 the square metre done properly, against $350 a patch done badly, the cheap version gets paid for twice over. Committees under levy pressure choose it regularly, and it reappears at the edges of the patch within a few years.

One point of law is worth stating because it changes how committees should think. The duty to maintain does not depend on an owner complaining, and a committee that knows about a defect and does nothing is in a worse position than one that did not know. Minutes recording that a problem was raised and deferred are a record that can be produced later, which is an argument for dealing with items instead of minuting them repeatedly. Minutes are a record of what was known and when, and that cuts both ways in any later dispute.

The Two Funds and the Limits on Spending

Queensland bodies corporate hold money in two funds with different purposes, and the distinction is set by the legislation rather than by committee preference. Understanding which fund an item belongs in explains most of what happens at a general meeting and all of what happens when a special levy arrives.

The administrative fund covers the recurring operating costs of the scheme. Insurance premiums, management fees, grounds maintenance, cleaning, electricity for common areas, fire system servicing, lift servicing and ordinary day to day repairs all come from it. It is raised through the regular levies and it is budgeted annually, with the expectation that it is spent each year instead of accumulated. A large administrative fund surplus usually means the levies were set too high, and a deficit means they were set too low.

The sinking fund covers items that recur over a longer cycle or arise once in the life of the building. Repainting in a Dulux or Taubmans system, roof replacement, membrane renewal, lift modernisation on a Kone or Otis installation, replacing a Rheem or Rinnai hot water plant and resurfacing a driveway all belong here. The fund accumulates over years so that when the item arrives the money already exists, which is the entire point of it. Nobody enjoys contributing to it, and everybody prefers it to a five thousand dollar levy notice.

Queensland requires a sinking fund forecast covering a defined forward period, and that document is the mechanism that makes the fund work. It lists the major items, when each is expected to need doing, what each will cost, and therefore what the annual contribution needs to be. Without it a committee is guessing, and guessing on a building with balconies and a lift produces a shortfall. Those two items alone can account for most of a forecast. Guessing them is how schemes end up underfunded by six figures. A lift alone can account for most of a forecast on a small building.

Special levies are what happens when the forecast was absent or ignored. An item arrives, the sinking fund does not hold enough, and the shortfall is raised from owners as a one-off levy that can run into thousands of dollars per lot with little notice. In Queensland schemes that is the single most common cause of serious owner dissatisfaction, and it is almost entirely preventable with a forecast and the contributions to match it. The forecast costs a few thousand dollars once, and the levy increase it recommends is unpopular. The special levy that arrives instead is considerably more unpopular.

Spending limits constrain what a committee can do without taking it to owners, and they are set by the regulation module applying to the scheme. There is a limit on what a committee may spend on a single item without an ordinary resolution of the body corporate, and a separate and much lower limit on improvements to common property. The figures differ between modules and are set per lot in some cases, which is why a twenty lot scheme and a six lot scheme have very different committee latitude. Check the module before assuming what the committee can do. It is named in the community management statement, and getting it wrong invalidates the decision and not merely annoying people.

The distinction between maintenance and improvement matters for those limits. Replacing a failed roof with an equivalent roof is maintenance. Replacing it with a different and better roof, adding solar, or converting a garden bed into additional car spaces is an improvement, and improvements face tighter limits and higher resolution requirements. Committees get caught where a repair is specified with upgrades attached without the authorisation that implies.

Quotation requirements sit alongside the spending limits in each module. The regulation modules require a body corporate to obtain a specified number of quotations before committing to work above a threshold amount, typically two quotes above one figure and more above a higher one. Those requirements exist to protect owners and they are a defence for a committee, which is why a committee that follows them is in a much better position if the decision is later questioned. Following the process is protection and not bureaucracy, and an adjudicator will look at whether it was followed. A committee that cut a corner on quotes has given away its best defence.

General guidance on all of this, written for owners and committees rather than for lawyers, is published through the Queensland Government. It is genuinely readable, it is free, and an owner who reads the section covering their own regulation module will understand their scheme better than most committee members do.

Urgent Repairs, and Who Can Authorise Them

A burst pipe in a common stack at eleven at night does not wait for an ordinary resolution, and the framework recognises that. Committees have the ability to act on genuinely urgent matters without the quotation and resolution process that applies to planned work, and knowing where that line sits prevents both paralysis and overreach.

The test is whether the work is necessary to deal with something that threatens safety, security or further damage. Water entering a building, an electrical hazard, a failed lock on a common entry, a dangling piece of facade and a blocked sewer all meet it. A tired carpet in the lobby, a cracked path and a gate that sticks do not, however long they have been annoying people. The distinction is about risk and damage, not about irritation. Committees occasionally stretch it to get something done quickly. That is the misuse the process is designed to catch.

What a committee should do in an urgent situation is act, document and report. Authorise the make-safe, keep the invoice and the photographs, and bring it to the next committee meeting with a short record of why it could not wait. That record is what answers an owner who queries the expenditure later, and it takes five minutes to write on the night. Nobody wants to do it at eleven o'clock, and it is far easier then than reconstructing it six weeks later. A photograph and three sentences in an email is enough.

The make-safe and the permanent repair are two different pieces of work and separating them is good practice as well as good value. Stopping the water, isolating the circuit or propping the hazard is urgent. Renewing the membrane, rewiring the section or rebuilding the facade element is planned work that can go through the proper process with quotes and a resolution. Our emergency plumber and emergency electrician pages cover the first of those.

Committees should have the after-hours arrangements in place before they are needed, and most do not. A nominated plumber, electrician and general trade who know the building, hold the right insurances and can attend at night is worth organising in a quiet month. In the middle of a storm event, a committee without those contacts is competing for attention with every other building in the suburb. Trades go to the clients they already know first, which is neither unreasonable nor in any way unpredictable. An hour spent in a quiet month buys priority in a busy one.

Access to lots during an urgent repair is a recurring friction point. A body corporate generally has the ability to enter a lot to carry out necessary work to common property, usually on notice except in a genuine emergency, and the by-laws will set out the mechanics. Knowing the notice requirement in advance avoids a standoff at a front door while water runs through a ceiling. The by-laws set out the notice period, and reading them before the emergency is the only time that is any use. Most owners cooperate readily once they understand the position.

Where an owner has caused the damage, the cost position changes but the response should not. The body corporate still fixes common property, and the question of recovering the cost from the owner responsible is dealt with afterwards and not at the point of the emergency. Delaying a repair while liability is argued almost always increases the eventual bill. Water does not pause while responsibility is being determined, so the order is to fix first and apportion afterwards. The apportionment conversation is far easier once nothing is actively getting worse.

Work health and safety brings in an obligation most committees have never considered. A body corporate engaging contractors is a person conducting a business or undertaking for the purposes of the work health and safety framework, which means it carries duties around the safety of the people working on its property. Those duties are administered by WorkSafe Queensland, and they are a strong reason to use contractors who manage their own safety properly instead of whoever answered first. Few committees have thought about this obligation at all. It applies regardless of whether anybody has thought about it. Using contractors with their own systems in place is the practical answer.

Licensing checks belong in the same bracket and they are quick. Any building work above the threshold needs a licensed contractor working to a written contract in the prescribed form, while plumbing, electrical and fire work each sit under their own licence class. The Queensland Building and Construction Commission keeps the register public, and a committee checking a licence before engaging is protecting owners rather than being difficult. The search takes under a minute, and it also shows any licence conditions or history. Nothing argues against doing it on every engagement.

Fire safety has its own urgency and its own regime. Exit lighting, alarms, hydrants, extinguishers and evacuation arrangements are subject to maintenance and testing obligations, and in some classes of building the requirements are substantial. Guidance for building owners and occupiers is published by the Queensland Fire Department, and our smoke alarm installation page covers the detection side at lot level. Queensland requires interconnected photoelectric alarms in residential properties, and the units have a sealed ten year life. A block built in 2014 is due for replacement about now.

Disputes, and Why Queensland Does Not Start at the Tribunal

This is where Queensland differs most sharply from the southern states and where owners most often take the wrong first step. Body corporate disputes in this state do not begin at a tribunal. They begin at the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management, which provides information, conciliation and then adjudication, and only afterwards is there a path to the tribunal. Owners regularly lodge at the tribunal first, and the application is returned and months are lost. Knowing the sequence is worth more than knowing the law.

The sequence starts with self-resolution and the process expects it. Before any application is accepted, the applicant generally has to show they made a genuine attempt to resolve the matter directly, which in practice means writing to the committee or the body corporate manager setting out the problem and what is sought. That letter is both a procedural requirement and the single most effective step, because a large proportion of disputes end at that point. A clear letter setting out the problem and the request is often enough. Committees respond to specifics far better than to general complaints. It also creates the record everything else relies on.

Conciliation is the next stage and it is free. A conciliator from the Commissioner's office convenes the parties, usually by telephone, and attempts to reach an agreement. There is no determination and nothing is imposed, but agreements reached in conciliation can be recorded and are frequently honoured, and the process is quick compared with anything adversarial. Neither party pays anything for it, and attendance is usually by telephone. For a dispute that has become personal, having a third party in the room changes the tone entirely.

Adjudication is the stage where a binding decision gets made. An adjudicator considers written submissions from the parties and makes an order, which can require the body corporate to carry out work, require an owner to do or stop doing something, or resolve a question about the interpretation of the by-laws or the community management statement. It is a documents-based process rather than a hearing, which makes the quality of the written material decisive. Nobody gets an opportunity to explain in person, so everything turns on the submission as filed. Spending time on it is the single highest-value thing an applicant can do.

What wins an adjudication is evidence rather than grievance, and this is where owners most often undermine themselves. Photographs with dates, a report from a suitably qualified professional, copies of correspondence showing what was raised and when, and extracts from the survey plan and community management statement establishing the ownership position are what an adjudicator works from. Several pages of narrative about how unreasonable the committee has been are not. Adjudicators read a great many of those and decide on the documents and the ownership position regardless. Grievance adds length to a submission without adding any weight to it.

The qualified report is the item worth spending money on. An engineer's or building consultant's assessment at $1,800 to $6,500 that identifies the defect, its cause, the party whose property it is and the work required converts an argument into a technical finding. Our tiling services page covers the trade most often involved in the remediation that follows a waterproofing finding. The report has to come from somebody appropriately qualified. A builder's opinion in an email does not carry the same weight. The cost of the report is small against the cost of the work it directs.

Appeals from an adjudicator's order go to the tribunal, and that is the point at which the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal becomes relevant. The appeal is on a question of law , not a rehearing of the facts, which means the adjudication is where the substantive case has to be made. Starting an application at the tribunal instead of with the Commissioner delays everything. The appeal is on a question of law, and facts not established at adjudication cannot be introduced later. The substantive case has to be made at the right stage.

Time matters in a different way than people expect. There is no benefit in waiting to see whether a problem resolves itself, because a deteriorating defect becomes more expensive and the record of inaction grows. Equally, an owner who has written three letters over two years and kept the replies is in a far stronger position than one who has complained verbally at four annual general meetings. Verbal complaints leave no record at all and minutes rarely capture them accurately. An email takes two minutes to write and then lasts indefinitely.

Where the dispute is with an insurer and not with the body corporate, the path is different again. Insurance complaints that cannot be resolved with the insurer directly go to the external dispute resolution scheme, which is the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, and that service is free to the complainant. Confusing the two pathways wastes months, and a great many strata repair disputes are really insurance disputes wearing a body corporate hat. Working out which one it really is saves a great deal of time, because the two processes do not overlap at all. Running the wrong one first is the common mistake.

Insurance, Storm Damage and the Queensland Reality

A Queensland body corporate carries insurance obligations that go beyond what an individual homeowner deals with, and the cover required depends again on the plan type. With a building format plan the body corporate has to insure the building as well as the common property. With a standard format plan its cover extends to common property only, and each owner insures the building on their own lot. Owners in standard format schemes frequently do not realise this. A gap discovered after a storm is expensive, and checking it in a quiet month costs nothing.

That difference produces a predictable misunderstanding every storm season. An owner in a standard format townhouse scheme whose roof is damaged discovers the body corporate policy does not cover it, because the roof is on their lot. An owner in a building format apartment whose balcony is damaged finds it is covered, because the balcony structure is common property. Both outcomes follow from the survey plan rather than anybody's view of fairness.

Premiums in Queensland are high and rising, and committees should understand why and not simply resenting it. Cyclone exposure through the north, severe storm and hail exposure through the south east, and flood exposure in a great many river and creek catchments all feed into the pricing. A scheme in Townsville and an identical scheme in Toowoomba face materially different premiums for reasons that have nothing to do with their maintenance record at all. Shopping the policy annually is still worth doing, as is checking the sum insured against a current replacement cost. An underinsured scheme carries that shortfall collectively across every owner.

What does respond to a maintenance record is the claim. Insurers decline claims where the loss resulted from wear, deterioration or lack of maintenance instead of from an insured event, and a balcony membrane that failed over fifteen years is the clearest possible example. The storm did not actually cause that particular leak. It revealed it, and that distinction is the basis of a great many declined claims.

Keeping a condition report and a maintenance record is therefore an insurance strategy as much as a governance one. A scheme that can show it inspected, forecast and acted is in a far better position on a borderline claim than one with no records at all. Our storm damage repairs page covers the work itself. The record is what distinguishes a maintained building from a neglected one. Insurers ask for it, and schemes that keep it are treated differently from those that cannot produce anything.

Water damage spreading between lots is the most common and most contested claim type in Queensland apartment buildings. Water from a common property source entering a lot generally sits with the body corporate policy, water from a lot entering another lot usually involves the owners' own policies, and establishing which applies requires finding the source , not observing the damage. That investigation is worth paying for before anybody lodges anything. Lodging on an assumption and being wrong wastes an excess. It also creates a claims history for no benefit. A plumber with a camera resolves most of it in an hour.

The consequential work after water damage is frequently larger than the repair that caused it. Saturated plasterboard, wet insulation, ruined flooring and mould in a wall cavity are each separate scopes, and in a Queensland climate mould develops in days , not weeks. Our water and flood damage restoration and mould remediation pages cover both. Drying has to happen before rebuilding, because closing a wall over damp framing in this climate guarantees a second visit. The sequence matters a good deal more than the speed.

Cyclone season imposes a timetable on northern schemes that southern committees do not face. Roofs, flashings, balustrades, gutters, loose fixtures, trees and anything else that becomes airborne should be dealt with before November, and a committee that leaves the annual inspection until January has left it too late. In the week after a crossing there is no trade capacity anywhere in an affected region. That holds after every crossing without exception, which makes preparation a November task. Doing the same work in January is not preparation at all.

Excesses on Queensland strata policies are worth checking against the repair figures on this page. Where a policy carries a substantial excess, and particularly where a separate and higher excess applies to water damage or to named cyclone events, a repair in the low thousands may be entirely uninsured in practical terms. Knowing that before the event changes how a committee budgets instead of how it claims. A repair under the excess is simply a repair. Knowing the excess figures turns that into a planning input, and very few committees have them to hand.

One practical habit costs a committee nothing and pays repeatedly. Photograph the building and the common areas once a year, from the same positions, and keep the images with the minutes. That record establishes the condition of the building at a point in time, which is what both an insurer and an adjudicator will eventually want to know and what nobody can reconstruct afterwards. Use the same positions each year and keep the files with the minutes rather than on somebody's phone. Committees change over and phones get replaced.

Common Property Repair Costs Across Queensland

Pricing on strata work moves with contractor availability, access and the local failure pattern, and the last of those varies more across Queensland than most people expect. Coastal schemes deal with spalling and salt corrosion, northern schemes with cyclone compliance, and inland schemes with reactive soils and hail. The table below gives indicative figures for three common items and names the dominant local driver. Those drivers matter more than the headline figures, and a committee that understands why its region is priced as it is budgets better. It also recognises a quote that has been priced for the wrong location.

The spalling column tells the clearest regional story on this page. Concrete spalling is driven by chloride penetration from salt air, which means it is a coastal problem that barely registers inland. A beachfront block on the Gold Coast or at Cairns will be dealing with it continuously across its life, while an identical building in Toowoomba or Mount Isa may never see a single patch of it. Distance from breaking surf is the governing variable, and a kilometre inland makes a measurable difference. A beachfront position is a different building altogether in maintenance terms.

Repaint pricing tracks access and height more than labour rates. A single storey block with scaffold-free access prices at the bottom of the band anywhere in the state. A four storey block requiring swing stage or rope access prices at the top of it in Brisbane and higher again in a regional centre where the access equipment has to be freighted in. Rope access is often cheaper than scaffold on a tall narrow building. Scaffold wins where many trades need the same access over weeks. Asking which method is being priced is a fair question.

Northern schemes carry a compliance overlay the south east does not. Cyclonic wind classification affects roofing, flashings, balustrades, window and door hardware and anything fixed to the facade, which means a like-for-like replacement in Cairns involves specifications and certification that the same job in Brisbane does not. Budgeting a northern replacement at a south east figure produces a shortfall every time. Our roofing services page covers that side of the work.

Timing is worth planning around, and on strata work the constraint is the meeting calendar as much as the weather. Major items need a resolution, resolutions need a meeting, and meetings need notice, so a committee that identifies a repaint in March can have it done in the dry winter months while one that identifies it in October will be working in the wet or waiting a year. Starting the quotation process a season ahead of the work is the single most useful piece of scheduling advice available to a committee. Quotes take weeks to obtain properly, and resolutions take a meeting and notice. Working backwards from the season , not forwards from the decision is the way to plan it.

What to Look Out For in a Common Property Quote

Strata quotes are harder to compare than domestic ones for a structural reason: the person reading them is usually a volunteer committee member with no construction background, and the person providing them knows that. The remedy is not expertise but process, and a committee that insists on a few specific things in writing will get comparable quotes from contractors who are used to being asked.

Start by specifying the scope yourself in place of asking three contractors what they would do. Three different scopes with three different prices cannot be compared, and the cheapest will always be the narrowest. Where the work is significant, a consultant's specification at a few thousand dollars produces quotes that are actually comparable and usually saves more than it costs on a job over fifty thousand dollars. The specification also makes the contractors' job easier, and good contractors prefer quoting a defined scope. The ones who prefer vagueness are the ones to worry about.

Require the ownership position to be stated on the page. A quote for work on a balcony, a window, a wall or a roof should say whether the item is common property under the scheme's plan type, because a body corporate paying for work on a lot owner's property is spending other owners' money without authority. On a standard format plan scheme in particular, this is where committees make expensive mistakes. Paying for work on lot property is a breach rather than a generosity. Owners can and do raise it afterwards, and the committee members who approved it are the ones who answer for it.

Insist on licence details and then actually check them. Work above the threshold calls for a licensed contractor and a prescribed written contract, while plumbing, electrical, waterproofing and fire work each carry a licence class of their own. The register at the Queensland Building and Construction Commission takes a minute to search and a committee that does it has discharged a real responsibility by doing so. It takes less time than reading the quote, and the register is public and free. No version of this fails to be worth doing.

Get public liability and workers compensation certificates for every contractor, not just the large ones. Twenty million dollars of public liability is the ordinary expectation on multi-unit work, and the certificate should be current , not last year's. A body corporate carries duties as a person conducting a business or undertaking, which makes this more than merely prudent. The duty is not widely understood in small schemes. It applies to all of them regardless, and using properly insured contractors is how it is discharged in practice.

Require the cause to be diagnosed, not just the symptom described. A quote to re-tile a balcony that says nothing about the membrane beneath it is a quote to cover up a problem. A quote to patch spalled concrete that says nothing about chloride contamination or steel treatment will be needed again within a few years. Insist that the quote states what failed and why, and be suspicious of any that cannot.

Pin down the access arrangements and who pays for them. Access equipment on a multi-storey building can cost more than the repair it enables, and whether it is included, excluded or shared across several items in the same campaign changes the comparison entirely. Bundling work into one access period is usually the largest available saving. It also halves the disruption to residents, and two campaigns means twice the scaffold and twice the noise. Residents notice the second one far more than the first.

Ask what is going to happen to the occupants. Strata work happens in an occupied building, and a scope that requires balcony access through lounge rooms, water shut-offs, lift bookings, parking displacement or noise restrictions needs those arrangements stated. A contractor who has worked in occupied buildings raises all of it unprompted. One who has not will create forty complaints in the first week.

Check the quote against the spending limits and the quotation requirements before accepting it. Committees exceed their authority most often by accident, approving an item above the limit or accepting a single quote where the module required two. Our electrical safety inspection and plumbing services pages cover two of the areas where a periodic inspection quote often sits just under the limit while the resulting works do not. That is a predictable sequence rather than a trap. Budgeting for the likely outcome of an inspection avoids it. An inspection that finds nothing is the unusual result.

Get the warranty position and the defects process in writing. On work over the threshold the statutory warranty framework applies, and on larger projects a defects liability period with a retention is normal practice. A committee that has no record of what was warranted, by whom and until when has no practical remedy when something fails in year two. The warranty exists whether or not anybody recorded it. Finding the right contractor two years later is the hard part. A single page in the file solves that permanently.

Record the decision properly in the minutes, including the alternatives considered. Statutory consumer guarantees, which the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes, cover the engagement whatever the quote says, but the protection that matters most to a committee is the record showing it obtained the required quotes, considered them and acted within its authority. That record is what answers an owner at the next annual general meeting. Owners rarely object to money being spent well, though they do object to not knowing why. Minutes that record the reasoning deal with both of those.

Getting Common Property Quotes Across Queensland

Five documents make a strata repair quote accurate and a committee that sends them with the enquiry gets better numbers than one that does not. Those are the survey plan showing the plan type, and the community management statement with its by-laws and any exclusive use allocations. Then the most recent building or condition report held, and any engineer's report covering the item concerned. And the sinking fund forecast, so a contractor understands what has been budgeted.

Photographs do more on strata work than on almost any other job because the scale is larger and the access harder to judge. Each elevation from the ground, the specific defect close up, the surrounding context showing what is above and below it, and the ground conditions on each side of the building for access assessment. A contractor who can see that there is no vehicle access to the rear elevation will price it correctly the first time. Access surprises are the most common source of variations on strata work. Photographs remove almost all of them, and ten minutes with a phone is the whole investment.

Describe the occupancy honestly, because it affects both the price and who is willing to quote. A fully owner-occupied block of twelve, a short-term letting complex with daily turnover, and a building with a mix of owners and long-term tenants are three different working environments. Short-term letting in particular imposes real constraints on noise, access and timing that a contractor needs to know about before quoting. Discovering it in week one produces a variation and a round of complaints from residents nobody warned. Honesty at quote stage is cheaper than either of those.

Decide what else should be in the same access campaign, because this is where the largest savings on strata work sit. If scaffold or rope access is going up for a repaint, the time to do the spalling, the balcony membranes, the balustrades, the window seals and the gutters is while it is up. Our commercial painting page covers the larger painting scopes and the wider renovation services pricing shows what the surrounding trades cost. Planning a campaign in place of a repair is the shift that saves money. It requires a forecast and a committee willing to look forward, and both are easier than they sound.

Keep the record in a form that survives a change of committee, which is the real governance problem in small schemes. Quotes received and the basis of the decision, the contract, the licence and insurance certificates, the warranty terms and the defects period, photographs before and after, and the invoices. Committees turn over, managers change, and a scheme with ten years of records is a scheme that does not pay twice for the same investigation. Our landscaping page covers the grounds side that often gets its own separate file. Give us the plan type, the item needing work, the number of lots and the storey height, and The Quote Yard will put the job in front of Queensland contractors who work on community titles schemes nearby.