The gap is almost never about price. It is about scope.
Why most strata quotes are not comparable
When a body corporate asks three contractors to "quote on the roof," each one goes and looks at a different roof.
The cheapest quote is often pricing a repair. The middle one is pricing a repair plus the flashing that obviously failed with it. The expensive one has priced a replacement because they think the substrate is gone. All three are honest. All three are quoting a different job. Setting them side by side and picking the lowest number isn't a decision — it's a coin toss with a spreadsheet.
A quote is only an answer. If the question was vague, the answers cannot be compared.
The law requires quotes. It does not require them to be useful
In Queensland, once a proposed spend exceeds the scheme's major spending limit, at least two quotations must be obtained and considered before the decision is made. In New South Wales, section 102 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 requires an owners corporation to obtain at least two independent quotations for expenditure of more than the prescribed amount — and since December 2023 that applies to every scheme, not just large ones.
Both requirements can be satisfied with two quotes for two different jobs. The letter of the rule is met. The purpose of it — giving owners confidence the spend is commercially priced — is completely defeated.
Two comparable quotes protect a committee. Two incomparable quotes just create a paper trail for a decision nobody can defend.
What makes a strata quote comparable
Comparability is created before the quotes are requested, not after they arrive. A scope that produces comparable quotes contains:
- The defect, not the remedy. Describe what is happening — water entering the ceiling of Lot 4 after heavy rain — rather than instructing the trade to replace the flashing. Let them tell you what's wrong; that's what you're paying for.
- Photographs, dated, and taken by someone who was standing there. A committee member with a phone will beat a manager's second-hand description every time.
- Access and constraints. Scaffolding needed? Body corporate approval for common property? Residents to notify? Every unstated constraint becomes a variation later.
- The boundary. Which parts are common property and which sit inside a lot. Get this wrong and the body corporate pays for something it never owed.
- What must be included in the price. Make-good, waste removal, certificates, warranty period.
- A structure for the answer. Price, inclusions, exclusions, days to start, days to complete, warranty, validity. Same fields from every contractor.
That last one is the whole trick. When every quote comes back in the same shape, the comparison takes minutes and the differences are real.
The variation problem, and where it comes from
The most expensive strata jobs are almost never the ones that were expensive at quote. They're the ones that were cheap at quote and grew.
A contractor who priced against a vague scope is not being dishonest when they invoice for the extra work — they never agreed to do it. The variation was created the day the scope was written. This is why the lowest quote against a thin brief is frequently the most expensive outcome, and why committees who have been burned twice tend to over-correct by simply reusing whoever they used last time, which is how a scheme ends up with one contractor and no market.
The record is the other half
A quote cycle produces two things: a decision, and the evidence for it.
Committees are challenged on spending far more often than they expect — by an owner at an AGM, by a purchaser's solicitor doing a records inspection, occasionally by an adjudicator. The questions are always the same. Who was asked? Who responded? What were they asked to price? Why was that one chosen?
A committee that can answer from a complete record is untouchable. A committee answering from memory and a forwarded email thread is not. And that record needs to outlive the manager who happened to be in the chair that year — because the building will still be there, and so will the next roof.
That is the part StrataTrade is built around: jobs scoped once and properly before anyone quotes, every quote returned in the same structure so the comparison is real, and the quotes, the recommendation and the decision kept permanently against the building. Comparable quotes stop being something a committee has to fight for, and become what turns up by default.
Run the quote cycle properly, keep the record forever.
StrataTrade scopes jobs once and properly, returns structured comparable quotes from verified trades, and keeps every quote, recommendation and decision permanently on the building's record — ready to table.
See how it works