What Happens If a NSW Owners Corporation Doesn't Maintain Common Property?

First published: 11 August 2026 · Last updated: 11 August 2026

Every committee in NSW knows, at least vaguely, that the owners corporation has to maintain common property. It's Section 106 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, and we've set out what the duty actually requires in our guide to NSW strata maintenance obligations.

What far fewer committees know is what happens if it doesn't.

For most of the last decade the practical answer was: not much, and not quickly. The duty existed, but enforcing it was essentially a private matter. An aggrieved owner had to take their own owners corporation to the Tribunal, at their own cost, against their own neighbours. Most people looked at that prospect and decided to live with the leak.

Three changes have quietly rewritten that. None of them made maintenance more mandatory — the duty in s106 is the same strict duty it always was. What changed is that there are now three separate routes by which a failure to maintain lands on the owners corporation, and one of them no longer requires anyone to sue anybody.

The short answer

If an owners corporation doesn't maintain common property, three things can now happen — independently, and any of them can happen without the other two:

1. NSW Fair Trading can investigate and enforce. Since 27 October 2025 the regulator can require documents and answers, enter premises, and issue binding compliance notices. If a notice isn't complied with, it can fine the owners corporation. At the far end, it can ask the Tribunal to appoint a strata managing agent — which ends self-management.
2. An owner can claim damages for six years. The limitation period for an owner to bring a damages claim against their own owners corporation for a maintenance failure went from two years to six on 1 July 2025.
3. It shows up when someone sells. From 1 April 2026, the s184 certificate a buyer's conveyancer reads must disclose orders and certain compliance action against the owners corporation — including under Fair Trading's repair-and-maintenance power.

The rest of this article walks through each one.

Route 1: Fair Trading investigates

This is the genuinely new one, and it is the one committees are least prepared for.

Before October 2025, if you complained to Fair Trading that your owners corporation wasn't fixing something, Fair Trading could offer mediation and little else. Now there is a published Common Property Repairs and Maintenance Compliance and Enforcement Policy and a documented escalation path behind it.

How it typically runs:

Step 1 — Mediation. Free, and still the first port of call. An owner applies; Fair Trading facilitates. Most matters that get this far are resolved here, and they are resolved cheaply.

Step 2 — Assessment. If mediation doesn't work, or the owners corporation declines to take part, Fair Trading assesses the complaint. This is the point at which it stops being a dispute between neighbours and starts being a regulatory matter.

Step 3 — Investigation. Fair Trading can require documents, require answers, make records, and enter premises. In practice this means: show us your maintenance records. For a building whose records are a folder of invoices and one person's memory, this is where the problem becomes visible — not because the building is badly maintained, but because nobody can demonstrate that it isn't.

Step 4 — Enforcement. Depending on what it finds, Fair Trading can:

• ask for a rectification plan;
• accept an enforceable undertaking — a formal written commitment by the owners corporation to fix the problem;
• issue a compliance notice requiring specific action, such as carrying out a repair, meeting a standard, or using a licensed professional;
• issue a penalty infringement notice — a fine. Note the sequence: the fine attaches to not complying with an undertaking or a notice, not to the original breach. In other words, the expensive mistake isn't the deferred repair. It's ignoring the letter about it.

Step 5 — The Tribunal. Fair Trading can apply for an order requiring the owners corporation to stop or fix the breach — or for the compulsory appointment of a strata managing agent to take over management of the scheme.

That last one deserves a sentence of its own, because for a self-managed building it is the whole ballgame. A committee that has run its own building for twenty years can, at the end of this path, have a managing agent appointed over it by order. Not chosen. Appointed.

To be clear and proportionate: this is the far end of an escalation ladder with several off-ramps, and an owners corporation that engages with the process will almost never reach it. As at August 2026, no enforcement action against an owners corporation has yet been made public — the machinery is new — but the policy, the escalation path and the penalties are all in place. It exists now, and it didn't before.

Route 2: An owner claims damages — for six years

Since 1 July 2025, an owner has six years — up from two — to bring a damages claim against their own owners corporation where a failure to maintain and repair common property has caused them loss.

Tripling the window sounds technical. It isn't. It changes who carries the decision.

A two-year window meant a deferred repair was, in practical terms, the sitting committee's problem, and it usually surfaced while the people who deferred it were still in the room. A six-year window means the decision to defer follows the building through two or three committee turnovers. The people who eventually deal with the claim are frequently not the people who made the call — and the minutes will say who did.

The loss doesn't have to be dramatic. Damaged contents from a leak that was reported repeatedly. A lot that couldn't be tenanted while a common property defect went unrepaired. Costs an owner incurred fixing something the owners corporation should have.

The practical implication for a committee is about record-keeping, not about lawyers. In a claim like this the central question is what the owners corporation knew and when. The building with a dated register showing an issue was identified, assessed, prioritised and scheduled is in a completely different position to the building that can only say “we didn't realise.”

Route 3: A buyer's conveyancer reads it

This is the one nobody is talking about, and it may end up mattering most.

From 1 April 2026, the strata information certificate under s184 — the document a prospective buyer's conveyancer orders as a matter of routine — must include information about orders and certain compliance action against the owners corporation, including under Fair Trading's power to enforce repair and maintenance of common property.

Read that again with your owner hat on rather than your committee hat on. Maintenance enforcement has moved out of the governance column and into the sale price column. A compliance notice is no longer a private embarrassment between the committee and the regulator; it is a disclosed fact at every sale in the building until it's resolved.

Committees can argue about maintenance budgets for years. In practice, that argument tends to end the moment somebody works out it's showing up on the certificate.

“But we didn't know it needed doing”

This is the most common position a small self-managed building is actually in — and it's the weakest of the three defences available.

It's also usually true, and not anyone's fault. In a 6-to-20 lot walk-up there is generally no building manager, no scheduled inspection, and no register. Knowledge of the building lives in one person's head, and that person is a volunteer who has been on the committee for eight years and would quite like to stop. Nobody is being negligent. There is simply no system.

The uncomfortable part is that the three routes above don't distinguish between we chose not to and we didn't know. Both look identical in the records, because in both cases there are no records.

There's a related trap worth naming, because it catches conscientious committees rather than careless ones. A maintenance schedule that sets inspection frequencies and is then not followed can be worse than having none at all, because it evidences that the building knew what was required and didn't do it. If you build a schedule, you need to be able to show what was actually done against it — not just what was supposed to be.

What “we have a system” actually looks like

You don't need a facilities department. For a boutique block, four things do almost all the work:

1. A list of what you actually own. Every common property asset — roof, gutters, downpipes, switchboards, hot water plant, fire equipment, drainage, paths, gardens, the lot — with where it is, what condition it's in, and roughly how old it is. Most committees have never written this down, and almost every useful thing downstream depends on it.
2. A schedule attached to that list. Which items need something done to them, how often, and when each was last done. Statutory obligations (fire equipment, emergency lighting, safety switches, anchor points) flagged separately from advisory ones (gutter cleans, pest inspections, garden cycles), because they carry different consequences.
3. Evidence that it happened. Dates, invoices, contractor reports, photos. This is the part that turns a schedule from a liability into a defence.
4. A decision trail. When something is deferred — and things are legitimately deferred all the time — the minutes should say what, why, and when it will be revisited. “Deferred pending quotes, review March” is a defensible position. Silence isn't.

That is genuinely all of it. Our free strata maintenance checklist gives you a structure for the walk-through, and the capital works fund guide covers how the larger items get funded over ten years.

Three things worth doing this month

None of these cost anything.

• Find out when your statutory items were last serviced — fire equipment, emergency and exit lighting, common-area safety switches, roof anchor points. Not “we think annually.” Dates and paperwork. If you can't produce them, that's your first finding, and it's a common one.
• Write down every common property asset you can think of in twenty minutes. You'll get most of them. The gaps you find are the point of the exercise.
• Add a standing maintenance item to the committee agenda — completed, upcoming, deferred and why. Three minutes a meeting builds the decision trail all three routes above turn on.

Where we can help. If you'd rather not build this from scratch, a strata building maintenance inspection is where most committees start — we walk the whole of common property, document what's there and what condition it's in, and hand you a prioritised register you can work from.

The honest summary

The duty to maintain common property hasn't changed. What's changed is that there are now three separate ways it lands on you, one of them doesn't require anyone to take you to the Tribunal, and one of them shows up in front of buyers.

None of this makes an asset register or a maintenance schedule legally mandatory in NSW — it isn't, and be sceptical of anyone who tells you otherwise. What it does mean is that the informal approach that worked for the last thirty years now carries a risk it didn't carry two years ago, and that the buildings which can show a system are in a materially different position to those which can only say they meant well.

Most committees we meet are doing better than they can prove. Closing that gap is usually a weekend, not a crisis.

Disclaimer: This guide provides general information about NSW strata legislation. It is not legal advice. For advice about your building's specific circumstances, consult a strata lawyer.