Who we act for

Owners corporations

Common property defects are rarely one owner’s problem and rarely a small one. This page sets out the routes available to an owners corporation and the order to consider them in.

General information, not legal advice. This page sets out how the law generally applies. It does not take account of your circumstances, and you should get advice about your own situation before acting on it. The official sources this page is written from are listed on it; where they differ from anything here, they are the authority.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Defects in an apartment building arrive as a committee problem before they arrive as a legal one. Owners disagree about whether there is a defect at all, the strata manager has a view, the developer says it is maintenance, and meanwhile water is getting in somewhere.

An owners corporation has more routes available than an individual owner, and some of them run on their own timetables that begin at completion whether anyone is watching or not. This page sets out what those routes are.

Who can bring a claim, and about what

Defects on common property are ordinarily pursued by the owners corporation rather than by individual lot owners, because the owners corporation is responsible for common property. Defects inside a lot are a different matter and may belong to the owner of that lot.

The first practical task is therefore to work out what is common property and what is not, and to decide who is bringing what. A claim run by the wrong party, or a claim that mixes common property and lot property without distinguishing them, creates trouble that is expensive to unpick later.

The second is authority. An owners corporation acts through resolutions. Before proceedings are commenced, get the decision-making right — what has to be resolved, by whom and at what kind of meeting — because a challenge to the authority to sue is a distraction nobody needs in the middle of a defects case.

Bring the strata plan, the minutes and the schedule of what the committee says is defective to a first conversation. Those three documents answer most early questions.

The statutory duty of care reaches the people who built it

The Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (NSW) imposes a duty on a person who carries out construction work to exercise reasonable care to avoid economic loss caused by defects in or related to the building.

The important part for an owners corporation is who the duty is owed to. It is owed to each owner of the land and to each subsequent owner, whether or not they were party to any contract with the person who did the work. An owners corporation is taken to suffer economic loss where it bears the cost of rectifying defects that are the subject of a breach of that duty.

The duty cannot be delegated, and the Act applies despite any contract or stipulation to the contrary made after the relevant commencement. That is what makes it useful: it reaches past the contractual chain to people who never had any agreement with the owners corporation at all.

Whether the duty applies, to whom, and within what period are questions for advice on the particular building. They are not answered by a general page.

The strata building bond scheme

For the apartment buildings it covers, the Strata Building Bond and Inspections Scheme requires the developer to lodge a building bond with the Secretary before the occupation certificate is issued, and then runs a sequence of inspections after completion.

A building inspector is appointed and carries out an interim inspection and report, followed later by a final inspection and report. Defective building work identified in those reports is to be rectified, and the bond may be used to pay for rectification of defects identified in the final report. Anything left over goes back to the developer.

The scheme runs on a fixed timetable measured from completion, and the owners corporation has real tasks in it, including approving the building inspector and approving the cost of rectification. Those are not steps to discover late. If your building is within the scheme, find out where in the sequence it is before doing anything else.

The NSW Government publishes the stages of the scheme, the inspection windows and the owners corporation’s tasks. Check your building against them rather than relying on a summary.

Statutory warranties, and the clock

Where the work is residential building work under the Home Building Act 1989, the statutory warranties in section 18B apply, and for contracts signed on or after 1 February 2012 proceedings on them must be started within six years for a major defect and two years for any other defect, measured from completion.

Those periods apply to an owners corporation in the same way as to any other owner, and in a strata context they are often further along than anyone realises, because the building was completed before most of the owners moved in.

So the completion date is the first fact to establish in any strata defect matter, and it should be established from the documents rather than from recollection. Every route on this page is measured from it, and none of them waits while the committee decides what to do.

If your building is approaching the end of a period, that is the thing to act on this month. Investigation can continue afterwards. Where loss becomes apparent in the last six months of a period, NSW Government guidance describes a further six months to enforce the warranty — but whether that applies depends on the facts, so it is better not to have to rely on it.

Evidence, and the cost of getting it wrong

Strata defect claims are expert-evidence cases. The owners corporation has to prove what the defects are, what caused them, what the work should have been and what it will cost to put right, usually across a whole building rather than a single room.

That makes the choice of expert and the scope of the brief unusually important. A report that catalogues symptoms without identifying causes, or that prices rectification in a way that cannot be defended, leaves unanswered the questions a tribunal or court has to decide, however thick it is.

It also makes sequencing important. Rectifying defects before they have been properly documented can destroy the evidence of what was wrong. Where urgent work is genuinely needed to stop damage, document thoroughly first — photographs, measurements, samples, an inspection — and get advice about doing both at once.

Where a strata defect dispute is decided

Home building claims are heard by NCAT in its Consumer and Commercial Division, which also deals with strata schemes. For most home building applications, the dispute has to be referred to NSW Fair Trading first and evidence of the investigation attached unless the matter is exempt; the exemptions include a matter where the time for lodging a claim is due to expire within three months.

Larger and more complex building defect claims, including many multi-storey ones and claims relying on the statutory duty of care, are brought in the courts instead. The procedure is more formal and the costs consequences are different, which affects how a matter should be run from the first letter.

Which forum a particular claim belongs in depends on the claim, the amount, the parties and the causes of action, and it is a decision worth making deliberately at the start rather than by default. See NCAT and court.

What to do this month

Five practical steps for a committee that suspects it has a defects problem.

Establish the completion date and the occupation certificate date from the documents.
Find out whether the building is within the strata building bond scheme, and where in the sequence it is.
Get a schedule of the suspected defects, with locations and the date each was first reported.
Collect the reports, the minutes and the correspondence with the developer or builder in one place.
Take advice before commissioning a major expert report, so that the brief asks the right questions.

See also building defects and statutory warranties and who can rely on them. How we work sets out what a first conversation involves.