In New Zealand? Visit quarter.nz for body corporates.
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.
Victoria calls them rules rather than by-laws, and an owners corporation that has never made its own runs on the model rules in the regulations. Those are lawful but generic. Making your own requires a special resolution and lodgement with Land Use Victoria, and — importantly — Victorian rules can only cover what the Act says rules may cover. Anything outside that is not a rule, however solemnly it was passed.
Governed by the Owners Corporations Act 2006, administered by Consumer Affairs Victoria.
Many Victorian owners corporations assume they do and are actually running on the model rules. The answer changes what you are amending.
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.
Victoria is more prescriptive than most about the permitted subject matter. This is the question worth paying for.
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.
Start from the model set and change only what your building actually needs. It keeps the result lawful and the advice short.
And watch the 50% quorum — an interim resolution is a poor foundation for a rule you intend to enforce.
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.
A rule change that has not been lodged is not doing the job you passed it to do.
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 new owners at settlement, which is where most rule disputes begin.
In Quarter: Announce it to every owner and resident in a single send — email, and posted to the residents' portal at the same time.
Passed in good faith, unenforceable on the day they are tested.
Check. It is a five-minute question with a large consequence.
Without quorum it can be challenged, and a challenged rule is not one you want to be enforcing against a neighbour.
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 Victoria, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Consumer Affairs Victoria or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in Victoria and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
