Strata Dispute Lawyers in Melbourne

Your owners corporation owes you repairs it keeps putting off

Strata is the word most of Australia uses. Victoria calls the entity an owners corporation, and the governing law is the Owners Corporations Act, so the buildings and the arguments are familiar but the rulebook is different. If your dispute is about levies, managers or committee power plays, that governance side lives on the body corporate disputes page. This page is about your rights as a lot owner when the owners corporation is not doing its job.

The most common version arrives through the ceiling. A failed balcony membrane, a corroded shared pipe or a roof that should have been fixed two AGMs ago, and now your paint is bubbling and your tenant is giving notice. Section 46 of the Act is blunt: the owners corporation must repair and maintain the common property and the fixtures and services that go with it. The duty does not wait for the sinking fund to look healthier or for the committee to finish arguing about quotes.

If that duty is being ignored in your building, call MK Law on 1800 130 120. The first call is free, and we will tell you the same day whether the thing that is failing is common property and what an order against the owners corporation could include.

The boundary question decides who pays

Every strata repair fight starts with one document: the plan of subdivision. It defines where your lot ends and common property begins, and the answer changes from building to building. Some plans draw the boundary at the median of walls and floors, others at the interior face, and a pipe can change ownership at the point it stops serving more than one lot. Owners corporations sometimes deny claims by assuming the answer instead of reading the plan. We read the plan first, because a claim aimed at the wrong party wastes months.

Forcing the repair, and getting paid for the damage

The path runs from the building’s internal grievance procedure, through conciliation with Consumer Affairs Victoria, to VCAT, which can order the owners corporation to do the work and compensate you for what the delay destroyed: fittings, floor coverings, lost rent. Investor owners often end up at the tribunal twice over, since a tenant who moved out over a leak brings claims of their own, and a VCAT tenancy dispute with that tenant is a separate matter from the one you are running against the owners corporation. On paper it is a ladder; in practice, a lawyer’s letter that cites the repair duty, attaches the expert report and foreshadows a VCAT application resolves a large share of these disputes without a hearing, because committees settle quickly once the liability is spelled out.

Rules disputes follow the same track. An owners corporation can only enforce rules it validly made, and rules that are oppressive or beyond power can be challenged at VCAT rather than obeyed indefinitely.

New buildings add a third layer. Where the real culprit is defective construction, the claim runs against the builder or developer, usually with the owners corporation as the proper plaintiff for common property defects, and strict time limits apply to building actions. We run that thread with our building dispute lawyers so the strata claim and the defects claim reinforce each other. The full sweep of our property work, caveats to lease fights, is on the property dispute lawyers page.

What to do this week

Photograph the damage and date the photos. Get the plan of subdivision, or let us pull it with a title search. That search also shows anything else sitting on your title, and a caveat on property is far better discovered now than in the week you try to sell. Put your complaint to the owners corporation in writing, even briefly, because the compensation case is built on what they knew and when. Then call 1800 130 120 or use the form on this page. One free call will tell you who is liable here and what VCAT could order if it comes to that.