What's the process for urgent or emergency repairs?
Quick answer
Emergency repairs affecting safety or preventing further damage can generally proceed without waiting for a full committee meeting, but the decision and reasoning should still be recorded and reported to the committee as soon as practicable.
Key takeaways
- Genuine safety or damage-prevention issues can proceed without waiting for a meeting
- The authorisation and reasoning should still be recorded, even if after the fact
- Report emergency spends to the rest of the committee and owners promptly
Most strata legislation and scheme rules recognise that some repairs genuinely can't wait for the next scheduled decision point — a burst pipe or a safety hazard doesn't pause for an agenda.
What generally counts as urgent
- A risk to safety of residents, visitors or the public
- Something actively causing further property damage the longer it's left
- A compliance failure with an immediate legal consequence, such as a serious fire safety fault
What still needs to happen, even in an emergency
- Whoever authorises the emergency work should still record what was authorised and why, even if that record is created just after the event rather than before it
- The rest of the committee should be told as soon as practicable, not at the next scheduled meeting weeks later
- The job should still go through quotes where circumstances allow — "urgent" doesn't always mean "no time to get even one comparison," though sometimes it genuinely does
Recording it after the fact
Because Flex Strata's maintenance board isn't limited to jobs that started with a quote request, an emergency job can be logged with the work order and any available quote attached retrospectively, keeping the same audit trail as a routine job even though the sequence happened out of order under time pressure.
Reporting back to owners
Owners are generally entitled to know about significant emergency expenditure, even if it happened without prior owner approval — most schemes handle this by reporting it at the next meeting along with the reasoning for treating it as urgent. Being upfront about the decision, rather than letting it surface informally, heads off suspicion that a large spend was mishandled.
When it's not actually urgent
Committees sometimes stretch "urgent" to avoid the friction of getting proper approval for something that could reasonably have waited for a quote comparison or a committee meeting. It's worth being honest with yourselves about which category a repair genuinely falls into — the reasoning holds up much better later if it does.
Common follow-up questions
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