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NSW · Updated 25 July 2026
Your strata maintenance and capital works are residential building work
Most owners corporations treat a remedial project as procurement: get three quotes, pick one, pay as it goes. But work to repair, maintain, renovate or alter the common property of a residential strata building is residential building work — and the moment that lands, a whole body of law applies to your project. Written contracts. Insurance before any money moves. Statutory warranties running to the owners corporation. Payment clocks running in both directions. None of it is optional, and most of it is straightforward once you know it is there.
What follows, once it is building work
These are the requirements a residential building contract carries in NSW. On a remedial job the owners corporation is the principal — the same seat a homeowner occupies, with rather more money moving through it.
The high-rise assumption that costs schemes money
Committees and managers often believe home building compensation insurance does not apply to their building because it is more than three storeys. That exemption is for the CONSTRUCTION OF NEW buildings with a rise in storeys of more than 3 containing multiple home units.
It does not exempt renovation, alteration, repair and maintenance — including work to the common property of a high-rise strata building, which must be insured regardless of the number of storeys.
So a twenty-storey block spending $400,000 on remedial works is in exactly the same position as a homeowner: the certificate comes before a cent moves. Check any certificate on the public register at hbccheck.nsw.gov.au.
Who is actually in the contract — three parties, two contracts
This is worth being precise about, because almost every process failure on a strata project traces back to it.
If defects appear, how you respond is itself judged
An owners corporation that suffers loss must act reasonably in relation to that loss in order to recover it — it is not entitled to recover losses attributable to its own unreasonable conduct.
In practice that means: unless there are valid and reasonable grounds not to, the scheme should notify the builder of the defects and give a genuine opportunity to rectify, in a scope determined as reasonably necessary by independent experts.
The instinct is usually the opposite. A committee that has lost confidence wants the builder off the property and someone else engaged. That is understandable, and doing it without grounds can reduce the very claim the scheme is trying to protect. The safe course is unglamorous: notify properly, document the expert scope, give the opportunity, record what happens, and keep every date.
Where the money actually lands if this goes wrong
Not on the committee. On every owner.
Committee members are not generally personally liable for decisions they get wrong. Section 260 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 protects them from personal civil liability for acts done in good faith — including decisions that turn out badly.
Liability sits with the owners corporation as a collective. And the way an owners corporation funds an unexpected liability is a special levy — which arrives on every lot owner, including the ones who never wanted the works, opposed the contractor, or bought in last year.
That is the dispute this paperwork actually prevents. Not owners against the builder, and not owners against their manager — owners against each other. A special levy nobody expected is where a functioning scheme turns into an extraordinary general meeting, a tribunal application, and years of bad feeling in the lift.
Good paperwork keeps owners on the same side. It is not protection from anyone in the building. It is protection of the building fund, which is the one thing every owner, every committee member and the manager genuinely share.
And it makes the protection committees already have provable
Section 260 turns on good faith. Immunity can be lost for bad faith, fraud, undisclosed conflicts of interest, or acting outside authority — for example an individual member telling the builder to change the scope when the committee never resolved it.
A contemporaneous record of what was resolved, by whom, under what authority, and what was then instructed is exactly the evidence that decisions were made properly and within power. Committees do not need frightening about personal liability — the law already looks after them. They need the protection they already have to be demonstrable, and the one route that pierces it closed.
What good practice looks like on a remedial project
- Treat it as a building contract from day one, not a purchase order. Written contract, licence checked, certificate collected before any payment.
- One channel for instructions. Resolved by the committee, issued by the manager or superintendent, received by the builder, recorded. No site-side verbal directions from individual owners.
- Variations in writing before the work happens — description, price, GST, and effect on the completion date.
- Progress payments matched to work actually done, and the Act’s response clocks diarised the day a claim arrives.
- Every defect notified in writing, with the expert scope, and the response recorded.
- One chronology the scheme can hand over when the committee changes, the manager changes, or a lawyer asks.
This is general information about NSW law as at July 2026, not advice about your scheme. How these requirements apply depends on your building, your contract and your facts, and strata and building law in NSW has moved considerably in recent years. Where a remedial project or a defect claim involves real money, get advice on your own situation early.
A remedial project is a head contract run by volunteers.
Everything above is a document that has to exist, arrive, or be answered by a date — across a contract worth more than most houses, with a principal who meets monthly and changes every year. eSiteOffice writes what the contract and the Act require, serves it so service is provable, watches both sides’ clocks, and keeps one chronology that outlives whoever was on the committee. It opens in September.