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Every building is spending down an asset. The roof, the lifts, the membranes, the paint and the plant all have a service life and a replacement cost, and the only question is whether the owners corporation is collecting for them or deferring them. A maintenance plan is how you tell. A plan that is stale, generic or never reviewed does not tell you anything — it just makes the building feel prepared while the gap grows.
Victorian owners corporations of five or more lots must have a maintenance plan covering at least ten years, and prescribed owners corporations must also establish a maintenance fund to go with it. The plan is meant to be reviewed and reported on annually. In practice the Victorian pattern is a plan prepared once at the developer's hand-over and never revisited — which, given how much building costs have moved, means most of them are now well out of date.
Governed by the Owners Corporations Act 2006, administered by Consumer Affairs Victoria.
Five or more lots is the practical threshold for the plan itself.
In Quarter: Upload the plan you already have and Quarter reads it into a costed schedule of items, lifecycles and due years. From there it projects the fund thirty years out and tells you the annual contribution that actually funds it.
A developer hand-over plan from a decade ago is a starting document, not a current one.
Prescribed owners corporations must have one. Many have a plan and no fund.
The Victorian cost movement since 2020 is the single biggest source of understatement.
In Quarter: Quotes, studies, assessments and correspondence attach to the decision that authorised them, so the file an assessor, an owner or a buyer's solicitor asks for is already assembled.
Annual review is the expectation, and the AGM is where owners can see the position.
In Quarter: Book the year's meetings once — the AGM and the committee meetings around it — and Quarter carries the notice periods, the agendas and the invitations from there. The insurance renewal and the plan review sit on the same calendar, so the year is visible rather than remembered.
The plan's implied contribution, applied.
In Quarter: The plan's required contribution feeds the budget, and approving the budget raises the levies from it — so what owners pay is derived from the plan rather than from last year's number plus a bit.
Very common in Victoria and reliably under-costed.
The obligation is to fund the plan, not merely to hold one.
It is the mechanism that keeps the plan honest, and it is usually the first thing dropped.
Most buildings have something. Far fewer have a plan that reflects the building as it actually is, costed at what work actually costs now, and matched to what the fees actually raise.
A plan is only as good as the maintenance record behind it and the budget in front of it. Quarter connects the three.
What the plan said would happen, and what actually happened. The gap between them is the most useful number a committee has.
Budget from the plan's contribution rate rather than from last year's figure plus a bit.
Where a review is required, it is tracked as an obligation with a date, not a good intention.
Repairs, quotes, invoices and warranties attached to the thing they were for, so the next plan review starts from evidence.
What the fund holds, what the plan says it needs, and the difference — visible, so a levy increase is a conversation rather than an ambush.
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.
