Body Corporate Rules for Repairs and Maintenance: Who Pays and Who Decides

Owning an apartment or unit means owning two things: your unit, and a share of a building. The first you look after yourself. The second is looked after collectively, through the body corporate, under rules most owners never read until something needs fixing and the questions start: whose job is this, who pays, and who gets to decide? The answers live in the Unit Titles Act 2010, and they matter most exactly when the repair is big.

Who fixes what: the s138 rule

The dividing line is set by section 138 of the Unit Titles Act 2010. The body corporate must repair and maintain the common property, and also the building elements and infrastructure that serve more than one unit or the common property, even where they are physically located within someone's unit.

That second category is the one that surprises owners. Building elements include things like the cladding, the roof, structural components and balconies; infrastructure includes shared services like pipes and ducts. The practical consequence: the exterior envelope of the building, the facade, the cladding, the roof, the waterproofing, is almost always the body corporate's responsibility, not the individual owner's, because it serves everyone. Your leaking window may show up in your lounge, but if the water is coming through a shared wall system, it is a body corporate repair.

Inside the unit boundary, for things that serve only that unit, the owner is responsible. Most disputes sit at the seam, and the resolution usually turns on what the element serves, not where it sits.

The planning machinery: LTMPs and the fund

The Act does not leave maintenance to whoever notices a problem. Every body corporate must have a long-term maintenance plan covering at least the next 10 years: what will need maintaining and replacing, roughly when, and roughly what it will cost. Since the 2022 amendments to the Act, larger residential complexes (broadly, ten units or more) carry strengthened planning obligations, with more comprehensive plans over a longer horizon, a response to a history of under-planned buildings meeting expensive surprises.

Alongside the plan sits the long-term maintenance fund, money set aside through the regular levies so that planned works are pre-funded rather than a shock. A body corporate can opt out of the fund by special resolution of owners, but not out of the plan, and not out of the underlying duty to maintain. An opted-out building simply meets its maintenance bills the hard way, all at once, when they arrive.

For a buyer, these two documents are among the most revealing things you can read before purchasing a unit: a realistic plan and a funded account describe a building managing its future; a threadbare plan and an empty fund describe deferred bills with your name on them.

When the repair is big: how decisions and money work

Small maintenance runs through the committee and the operating budget. Major work, and envelope remediation is the classic case, runs through the owners.

Decisions are made at general meetings. Routine matters pass by ordinary resolution; significant decisions, and much major expenditure, require a special resolution, a 75 percent threshold. That is deliberate: work that will levy every owner substantially is not left to a simple majority on a quiet Tuesday.

Money comes from the owners through levies, generally allocated in proportion to each unit's ownership or utility interest, the shares set in the unit plan. Where the maintenance fund cannot carry a project, the body corporate raises a special levy for it. There is no third party behind the levies: the building's owners are its funders, which is why the state of the maintenance fund and the realism of the plan translate so directly into owners' bank accounts.

The honest sequencing lesson from buildings that have been through major remediation: the governance usually takes longer than the construction. Investigation, reports to owners, meetings, resolutions, levy timelines, then the work. A committee that starts the process when a problem is first flagged controls that timeline; one that waits until the problem forces the issue does not.

Envelope remediation: the body corporate's project

Put the pieces together and one conclusion follows. When a unit-title building needs weathertightness remediation, recladding, or facade repair, it is the body corporate's project: the envelope is common property or shared building elements (s138), the planning obligation sits in the LTMP, the funding comes through levies, and the decisions run through owners' resolutions. Individual owners cannot fix their slice of a shared wall, and the building cannot be remediated one apartment at a time.

In practice that means the committee ends up commissioning the investigation, engaging the engineers, obtaining the building consent, appointing the contractor, and communicating with a building full of owners while the work is staged around the people living there. The construction side of that, what facade remediation on an occupied building actually involves, and the specific issue of combustible cladding that has put many committees' envelopes on the agenda, are covered separately. The consented work itself ends, like any building project, with a Code Compliance Certificate, which for a body corporate is also the document that answers every future buyer's lawyer in one line.

For committee members feeling the weight of it: the Act's machinery, the plan, the fund, the resolutions, is genuinely on your side, because it converts an overwhelming problem into a sequence with rules. And the earlier the building's condition is honestly established, the more of that sequence happens on the committee's timetable rather than the building's.

If your body corporate is facing questions about the building's envelope, a flagged facade, a recurring leak, an under-planned maintenance horizon, a straight assessment of the building's actual condition is the place the whole process starts.