How Strata Committees Communicate With Owners

Three channels, three purposes

Most owner communication in a strata scheme falls into one of three types: notices the committee sends out, requests owners send in, and ballots used to make a decision between general meetings. Treating them as distinct — rather than one long email thread — makes it much easier to know what owners are entitled to see and when.

Notices

Notices are the committee talking to owners: meeting notices, works notices, access arrangements, changes to common property rules. They're typically one-way and time-sensitive, and many carry a statutory notice period that has to be met.

Requests

Requests run the other way — an owner reporting a maintenance issue, asking a question, or applying for something like a renovation or a parking change. A request should get a response and, where relevant, a decision that's recorded against that request rather than lost in a personal inbox.

Ballots

Ballots let the committee put a specific motion to owners for a vote outside a general meeting, useful for time-sensitive decisions that can't wait for the next AGM. A ballot needs a clear motion, a defined voting period and a transparent count.

What owners should see

Owners are entitled to visibility over things that affect their property and their money, generally including:

• Meeting notices, agendas and minutes
• Decisions made by the committee that affect common property or by-laws
• The outcome of any ballot they were entitled to vote in
• The status of a request they've personally lodged

What owners shouldn't see

Not everything the committee discusses belongs in front of every owner. Reasonable boundaries include:

• Draft discussion before a motion is finalised, particularly anything involving a named owner's dispute or personal circumstances
• Contractor negotiations still in progress
• Legal advice under privilege
• Other owners' personal requests or correspondence

The line isn't about secrecy for its own sake — it's about not turning every internal discussion into a public debate before the committee has actually decided anything.

The public request form problem

A common failure point is letting owners submit maintenance requests or general enquiries by email or phone with no shared record. The secretary becomes the only person who knows what's been asked, what's pending and what's already been answered — and when they're away, requests stall. A shareable public form that lands directly on a tracked request removes that bottleneck: owners get a receipt that something was logged, and the committee gets a record it can act on and report against.

Keeping a record without over-sharing

The safest approach is to separate the record from the audience:

1. Log every notice, request and ballot against a dated record, regardless of who's involved
2. Decide the appropriate audience for each item — all owners, one owner, or committee only
3. Publish outcomes once they're decided, not while they're still being debated
4. Keep the full history attached to the building, not to whichever committee member handled it

This matters most at handover. An incoming committee that can see the last two years of notices, requests and ballot outcomes starts with context. One that inherits a personal inbox starts from zero and repeats the same disputes.

Where things go wrong

A few patterns cause most owner-communication complaints:

• Notices sent too late to meet the required notice period
• Requests that get an informal verbal answer with nothing written down
• Ballots run by email reply, with no clear cut-off or verifiable count
• One owner getting a different answer to the same question than another, because there's no shared record of what's already been said

None of these need a complicated fix — they need every notice, request and ballot to land in one place that the whole committee, and the next committee, can see.

How Flex Strata handles it

Flex Strata separates these channels deliberately rather than running them all through one inbox. Notices go out to the right audience with a dated record. Requests can be submitted through a shareable public form so owners don't need a login, and each one is tracked from lodged to resolved. Ballots run with a clear motion, voting period and recorded outcome. Page-level access control means owners, committee members and the manager each see what's appropriate for their role — and the audit log means nobody has to take anyone's word for what was actually sent, asked or decided.