In New Zealand? Visit quarter.nz for body corporates.
Most buildings are running on the by-laws 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 body corporate 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.
Queensland keeps its by-laws inside the community management statement, which makes changing them a different exercise from anywhere else: you are not amending a by-law, you are recording a new CMS with Titles Queensland. That adds cost and time, and it is the reason Queensland schemes should batch rule changes rather than making them one at a time.
Governed by the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, administered by the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management.
The by-laws are in it. Working from anything else is working from a copy.
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.
Queensland's CMS process rewards batching. A lawyer reviewing five proposed changes costs little more than one reviewing a single change.
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.
Getting this wrong means recording a CMS on an invalid resolution.
Owners vote on the words that will be recorded.
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.
Until it is recorded, the by-law is not a by-law.
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.
To owners, occupiers and anyone letting a lot.
In Quarter: Announce it to every owner and resident in a single send — email, and posted to the residents' portal at the same time.
Each one is a fresh CMS. Buildings that batch spend a fraction of what buildings that don't do.
The Act limits these sharply, and a by-law of that kind is a liability rather than a rule.
Module-specific, and fatal to the amendment if wrong.
A by-law 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 by-laws 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 Queensland, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Queensland and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
