No. The spend is improper, and the size of the majority doesn't save it. Understanding why protects both committees (from making the mistake) and individual owners (from quietly paying for it).
The rule: a vote can't move a maintenance boundary
In a standard format plan scheme — the typical townhouse arrangement, where each lot contains a building and its yard, with boundaries marked on the ground — the exterior of each building sits inside the lot. Exterior walls, roof, foundations, doors and windows within the lot boundary are the individual owner's maintenance responsibility, not the body corporate's.
And the body corporate cannot pay for, or levy owners for, maintenance that is a lot owner's responsibility. It's a common misconception that a successful general meeting motion authorises the body corporate to spend its funds however owners collectively please. It doesn't. The limits on what body corporate funds may be used for are set by the legislation, and a resolution — even a unanimous one — can't override them.
So the repainting motion fails at the threshold: painting the townhouses is maintenance of the lots, the lots belong to the owners, and body corporate funds (which are simply the owners' contributions, pooled) can't lawfully be spent on it. The two owners who object in that scenario aren't being difficult — they're right, and an adjudicator would side with them.
The lawful alternatives
The legislation isn't hostile to schemes coordinating work — it just insists on the right structure. Three mechanisms do what the invalid motion tried to do:
1. Supply of services, by individual agreement. The body corporate can supply — or engage someone to supply — services to owners and occupiers: mowing, cleaning, pest prevention and similar maintenance services are the standard examples. This is how a townhouse scheme legitimately gets everyone's painting or lawns done under one contractor at a better rate. The conditions:
- it runs on agreement with each individual owner — a general meeting resolution cannot conscript anyone
- the owner who'd rather mow his own lawn can simply decline, even if his refusal costs the others a volume discount
- each participating owner pays their own supply charge — the cost is never folded into ordinary levies.
2. Cost recovery where an owner has failed to act. If an owner hasn't done maintenance they're required to do — under the body corporate legislation, a notice issued under other legislation, the community management statement or by-laws, an adjudicator's order, or a court or tribunal order — the body corporate can step in, do the work, and recover the reasonable cost from that owner. This is the remedy for the derelict townhouse dragging the scheme down: not a general vote to spend everyone's money, but a targeted process ending with the responsible owner paying.
3. An agreement with a particular owner for the body corporate to do specific work and charge that owner for it.
The common thread: body corporate funds stay with body corporate responsibilities; owner responsibilities are funded by the owner, whether they do the work or the scheme arranges it for them.
Where the body corporate's money should go in a townhouse scheme
The body corporate's own list in a standard format plan is real, just smaller than people assume: common property roads, gardens and lawns; shared facilities like the pool and barbecue area; and — the big hidden one — utility infrastructure that services more than one lot, even where it physically runs inside somebody's lot boundary. Shared stormwater, sewer lines and cabling regularly sit under private yards while remaining squarely the body corporate's job. (Common walls between attached townhouses, by contrast, involve no common property at all — maintenance is typically shared between the two adjoining owners, with the boundary usually through the centre of the wall.)
Getting the direction of responsibility wrong flows both ways: schemes improperly paying for owners' exteriors, and schemes improperly refusing shared-infrastructure work because "it's under lot 4's driveway."
Before any spend: three questions, on the record
For every proposed piece of work in a standard format plan scheme, the committee's sequence is: Whose responsibility is it? (Plan type and boundaries decide — check the survey plan, and where infrastructure is involved, what it services.) What's the lawful funding structure? (Body corporate funds, supply-of-services agreements, or cost recovery.) What approval and quotes does the spend then need? (Committee limit, major spending limit and the two-quote rule, or the improvement limits if the work changes rather than maintains.)
Committees that document those three answers per job are protected twice over — from spending challenges by owners, and from the slower rot of nobody remembering, three committees later, why the scheme paid for something. That per-job discipline is what StrataTrade turns into the default: work scoped in writing, responsibility and funding clear before quotes go out, comparable quotes back, and the decision recorded permanently against the building — whoever is on the committee that year.
This article is general information about Queensland body corporate law, not legal advice. It concerns community titles schemes under the BCCM Act regulation modules; different provisions apply under the BUGT Act, and exclusive use by-laws or your scheme's CMS can shift responsibilities. Confirm your scheme's position before acting.