In New Zealand? Visit quarter.nz for body corporates.
Nothing in Queensland law says a body corporate must pay somebody else to run it. Plenty of buildings already run themselves, and they are not heroic — they are organised. The work is real: meetings, minutes, levies, insurance, maintenance, and a set of records that has to stand up when somebody sells. Quarter does the part that used to require a manager, so what is left is the part owners were always best placed to do.
Queensland is the most explicit jurisdiction in the country about this. The Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997 treats self-management as an ordinary way to run a scheme, not as an exception. A body corporate manager is optional — and, unusually, is not required to hold a licence or a qualification. Which regulation module your scheme is registered under then decides most of the detail.
Governed by the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, administered by the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management.
Standard, Accommodation, Commercial, Small Schemes or Specified Two-lot. The module changes committee size, voting and meeting rules, so every other answer depends on it.
A body corporate manager's engagement has a term. Where it is close to expiry, letting it run out is usually cleaner and cheaper than terminating it early.
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.
Chairperson, secretary and treasurer are named roles with named duties in Queensland. Self-management starts by having three owners actually hold them.
In Quarter: Committee roles and who holds them are recorded against the building, so notices, voting rights and permissions follow the position rather than one person's inbox.
Queensland's notice period is longer than most, which is a gift: it gives owners time to read the motion rather than react to it.
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 body corporate roll, financial records, insurance, the sinking fund forecast and the scheme's money. Set a handover date in the same resolution.
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.
One AGM within the statutory window and committee meetings as needed. Booking them in advance is what stops the AGM being late — the single most common Queensland breach.
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 AGM has to be held within a set period each year. It is an easy obligation to satisfy and an easy one to forget, and it is the one owners complain about to the Commissioner.
Queensland is strict about how committee decisions are made and recorded. A decision taken in a group chat and never minuted is a decision that can be unwound.
It decides committee size, voting thresholds and spending limits. Advice written for a Standard Module scheme can be simply wrong for an Accommodation Module one.
A self-managed building is run by the people who live in it. That changes the texture of the place: decisions get made by neighbours who will live with them, and a question about your own home gets answered by somebody who already knows the building.
Self-management fails on admin, not on goodwill. Quarter is built to carry the admin so a volunteer committee is doing the judgement, not the data entry.
Agendas built from your open items, notices sent on the statutory clock, motions and votes recorded as they happen, and minutes drafted from the meeting rather than from memory.
Strike a budget and Quarter raises the levies from it, invoices owners, chases arrears and reconciles what lands in the bank account.
Every decision, document, invoice and piece of correspondence in one place, searchable, and still there when the committee turns over.
Insurance renewals, the sinking fund, and the reporting the Office of the Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management expects, tracked with dates rather than remembered in somebody's calendar.
Owners ask Quarter about their building — balances, decisions, documents — and get an answer immediately, instead of adding a question to the committee's pile.
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.
