Strata Building Management

How to use this course

This course is for people who look after strata buildings day to day: building managers, caretakers, onsite and resident managers, facilities staff in apartment towers, and people thinking about buying into the job. It is about the physical building and the people in it. It is not a course in strata management (the levies, meetings and records side), although you’ll learn enough about that work to do your own job well beside it.

Most problems in a building don’t start with the law. They start with a leak nobody followed up, a tradesperson who was never properly briefed, a fire door wedged open for a week, or a resident who felt ignored. So this course spends more time on maintenance, repairs and tradespeople than on anything else (Lessons 5 to 10).

One country, eight sets of rules

Australia has no national strata law. Each state and territory has its own Act, its own names for the same things and its own tribunal. A building manager in Brisbane works with a body corporate and a committee; one in Sydney works with an owners corporation and a strata committee; one in Perth works with a strata company and a council of owners. Lesson 2 has the full table.

The course has two parts:

• The core (Lessons 1 to 16) teaches the parts of the job that are the same everywhere, with an overview of where the states differ. When a lesson gives a state rule it says which state.
• State electives go deeper for one state or territory: the Act and regulations, the forms and processes, fire safety and WHS rules, and where to get help. Do the core, then the elective for the state you work in. Queensland has a second elective on management rights, a business model with no real equivalent elsewhere.

Strata law changes often. NSW rolled out a series of reforms through 2025 and 2026, including new duties for building managers, and Victoria rewrote parts of its Act in 2021 and again for short stays in 2025. Treat every legal detail here as a pointer to check, not the final word.

How each lesson works

• Goal: what you’ll be able to do by the end.
• The lesson itself, with tables and checklists you can copy.
• At Banksia Court: the lesson applied to our example building.
• On the job: a short task to do at your own building (or one you know, if you’re not working in one yet).
• Sources: the Acts, regulators and guides used.

Allow 30 to 60 minutes a lesson.

What the labels mean

Building management mixes law, industry custom and plain experience. Each lesson labels its advice so you know which is which:

• The law: a requirement in an Act or regulation. Check the current version for your state.
• Industry practice: what well-run buildings usually do, but no law requires it.
• Practitioner tip: advice from people who do the job. Useful, untested, and sometimes a matter of taste.
• Research: where peer-reviewed studies exist (mostly on safety and maintenance).

Banksia Court

Every lesson comes back to one fictional building:

Tools

Where a lesson mentions software or gadgets, the examples are often Refactor’s own tools (Stratager, ScanseQR and FloodWatch), because they’re what we know best. Any good equivalent does the same job, and a spreadsheet and a phone camera will get you a long way.

What this course is not

It is not legal, financial or insurance advice. Your agreement, your scheme’s by-laws and your state’s Act decide what you must do. When something has real consequences (terminating a contractor, entering a lot, an injury, a dispute that’s heading to a tribunal), stop and ask the committee, the strata manager or a strata lawyer.

General education, not legal advice. Strata law is different in every state and territory and it changes often (NSW and Victoria both changed theirs in 2025 and 2026), so check the current Act and your own agreement, and get advice before acting on anything here.