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Most buildings are running on the owners corporation rules they were handed at registration, plus whatever has been bolted on since. Some of those are unenforceable, some were never registered, and a few are the reason an otherwise sensible owners corporation is in a dispute it cannot win. This is the cheapest legal work a building can do, and the work that most often prevents the expensive kind.
The ACT calls them rules, and an owners corporation that has not made its own is running on the default rules in the Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011. Making your own takes a special resolution. The Territory's default set is more modern than most jurisdictions' original by-laws, so the honest advice for many Canberra buildings is that the defaults are already close to right — and the review is about the two or three things specific to the building.
Governed by the Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011, administered by Access Canberra.
A surprising number of Canberra owners corporations are on the defaults and do not know it.
In Quarter: Your registered rules, the amendments and the minutes that passed them sit together with dates on them. Ask the Manager what they say about a pet, a renovation or a short-stay letting and it quotes the rule back rather than making you read the set.
Usually a short list: parking, common facilities, renovations, short-stay letting.
Rather than commissioning a review of a set you have not departed from.
In Quarter: Put the agreement in your documents register and ask the Manager to summarise it — when it expires, how much notice it needs, what leaving early costs, and what they have to hand back. It reads the forty pages so the committee does not have to, and will turn the answer into a task with a date on it.
With the exact wording in the notice.
In Quarter: Build the motion from the quotes and the budget, send the notice to every owner off the ownership register on the statutory clock, and record the vote as it is cast — a decision carries its majority automatically and emails the outcome to whoever raised it.
The ACT expects decisions to be minuted, and a rule rests on the resolution that made it.
In Quarter: The ownership register, financial records, insurance, contracts and documents sit in one searchable place, so a handover is an export rather than an archaeology project — and they are still there when the committee turns over.
Including to tenants, who are bound by them and rarely given them.
In Quarter: Announce it to every owner and resident in a single send — email, and posted to the residents' portal at the same time.
Expensive, and usually unnecessary in the ACT.
They add nothing and create room for inconsistency.
They are bound either way, which makes enforcement harder than it needs to be.
A rule is the only thing standing between a shared building and an argument about what people may do in it. It is worth having ones that are current, that are enforceable, and that a court or tribunal would actually uphold.
Quarter does not give legal advice — that is what the lawyer is for. What it does is make the lawyer's job short, and make the outcome stick.
The registered set, the amendments, the minutes that passed them and the correspondence about them, together — so the first thing a lawyer asks for takes a minute rather than a fortnight.
Ask the Manager what your current rules say about a pet, a renovation or a short-stay letting. It will quote the rule back to you, which is often the whole answer.
A change to your owners corporation rules usually needs a particular resolution type and a particular notice period. Quarter puts it as that motion, on that clock, and records the vote.
The resolution, its date and its wording, held against the building — which is exactly what registration and any later dispute both need.
Rules published where residents and buyers can find them, rather than in an attachment to an email from 2019.
General information about Australian Capital Territory, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Access Canberra or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Australian Capital Territory and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
