How long can a strata manager be appointed for?
Section 50 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 sets the limits:
- The first strata managing agent — appointed at the first AGM after the scheme is registered — can be appointed for a maximum of 12 months. This is deliberate: the first agent is typically chosen under the developer's influence, and the short term forces an early decision by the actual owners.
- Every other appointment is capped at 3 years.
Reappointment requires a resolution of the owners corporation at a general meeting — the appointment does not simply roll over.
The end-of-term mechanics (where committees get caught)
Section 50 builds in machinery that most committees discover too late:
- The agent must give the owners corporation written notice that the term is ending, at least 3 months and no more than 6 months before expiry. That notice is the committee's starting gun for testing the market.
- The strata committee can extend an expiring appointment in blocks of up to 3 months while the reappointment decision is pending — but not past the next AGM.
- A 3-year appointment is taken to include an option for the agent to extend by up to 3 months after expiry if the owners corporation hasn't decided — unless the owners corporation gives the agent written notice, at least 3 months before the end of the term, that the agent won't be reappointed.
The practical translation: if the scheme intends to change managers, the decision and the written notice need to happen more than three months before expiry. A committee that starts the conversation at the AGM where the reappointment motion appears has already lost its leverage and possibly its timing.
The money: read for three streams, then ask about a fourth
1. The base management fee — the fixed annual fee for the agreed services: meetings, levy administration, records, correspondence within scope.
2. The additional services schedule — the rate card for everything else: extra meetings, repair coordination, obtaining quotations for work, dispute handling. This schedule, priced against the scheme's real activity, decides the true annual cost. Two agreements with identical base fees can differ by thousands of dollars a year here.
3. Disbursements — postage, printing, communications and similar recoveries.
4. Commissions and connections — now a legal disclosure matter. Since 3 February 2025, strata managing agents in NSW must disclose connections with suppliers and developers, and provide detailed breakdowns of insurance quotes including commissions and broker fees, with penalties for corporations that can reach six figures for non-compliance. If an insurance quote arrives without the commission broken out, that is a compliance problem, not a favour to request. (The insurance commission landscape shifted again through 2026 — that story is covered separately.)
The questions to ask before appointing or reappointing
- What would this agreement have cost on our actual activity last year? Ask every competing firm the same question over the same 12 months of real scheme activity — meetings held, jobs quoted, correspondence volume. It converts three fee streams into one comparable number.
- Is obtaining quotations for maintenance work an agreed service or a charged extra? For a building with genuine maintenance flow, per-quote charges accumulate into one of the largest lines in the agreement — and they shape the incentive around how many quotes get sourced per job.
- What are the notice dates? Diarise two dates the day the agreement is signed: the expiry date, and the date three months prior — the last day to give effective notice of non-reappointment.
- What connections and commissions must be disclosed? Ask for the disclosures the law requires, in writing, before the vote — not at the first renewal after it.
- What happens to the records at handover? The building's records belong to the owners corporation. Ask how they are stored, in what format they leave, and how long handover takes — the answer says a lot about how a change of manager will actually go.
The record outlasts the manager
Every manager relationship ends eventually — at year three if not before. What the owners corporation keeps is the record: the decisions, the quotes obtained, the reasoning behind the contracts let on the owners' money. Schemes that hold that record independently change managers as an administrative event. Schemes whose entire history lives in the outgoing manager's systems change managers as an archaeology project.
That is the architecture StrataTrade is built on: every job scoped, every quote received in comparable form, every recommendation and decision recorded permanently against the building — so the scheme's procurement history belongs to the scheme, whoever is managing it that year.
This article is general information about NSW strata law, not legal advice. Appointment terms are set by the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 and disclosure obligations have changed through 2025–26 reforms — confirm current requirements before appointing, reappointing or terminating a strata managing agent.