Nothing in New Zealand law says a body corporate must pay somebody else to run it. Plenty of buildings already run themselves, and they are not heroic — they are organised. The work is real: meetings, minutes, levies, insurance, maintenance, and a set of records that has to stand up when somebody sells. Quarter does the part that used to require a manager, so what is left is the part owners were always best placed to do.
The Unit Titles Act 2010 does not require a body corporate to appoint a manager. It requires the body corporate to do certain things — hold an AGM, keep records, maintain a long-term maintenance plan and fund — and leaves it to the owners whether they pay somebody to help. A great many New Zealand body corporates already run themselves. The 2022 amendments raised the bar on disclosure and maintenance planning, particularly for large developments of ten or more principal units.
Governed by the Unit Titles Act 2010, administered by Unit Titles Services.
Ten or more principal units, and it changes your maintenance planning, disclosure and reporting obligations. It is the first thing to establish and the easiest to get wrong, because the threshold counts principal units rather than every unit on the plan.
In Quarter: Ask Quarter and it quotes the Unit Titles Act and Regulations directly — the notice period, the quorum, the threshold, in the Act's own words rather than a paraphrase of them.
Term, notice period, and what happens to the records on termination. The contract, not the Act, sets your timeline.
In Quarter: Put the agreement in your documents register and ask the Manager to summarise it — when it expires, how much notice it needs, what leaving early costs, and what they have to hand back. It reads the forty pages so the committee does not have to, and will turn the answer into a task with a date on it.
Put the motion, take the vote, minute it. Distribute the minutes within the required time.
In Quarter: Build the motion from the quotes and the budget, send the notice to every owner off the ownership register on the statutory clock, and record the vote as it is cast — a decision carries its majority automatically and emails the outcome to whoever raised it.
The operational rules, the registers, the financial records, the insurance, the long-term maintenance plan and the fund balance — all of it belongs to the body corporate, and an outgoing manager has to hand it over. Chasing it is a list, a deadline and a follow-up, which is exactly the sort of work worth handing to somebody else.
In Quarter: Hand the chase to the Manager. It writes to the outgoing manager with the full list and the deadline the agreement sets, follows up when items are missing, files each one as it arrives, and tells you what is still outstanding — so the handover is somebody's job rather than nobody's.
Compulsory in New Zealand, and the piece most often out of date. For a large development that means 30 years of planning with the first 10 costed in detail.
In Quarter: Upload the plan you already have and Quarter reads it into a costed schedule of items, lifecycles and due years. From there it projects the fund thirty years out and tells you the annual contribution that actually funds it.
AGM, budget, levies, insurance renewal and the plan review. Committee members change; a calendar does not.
In Quarter: Book the year's meetings once — the AGM and the committee meetings around it — and Quarter carries the notice periods, the agendas and the invitations from there. The insurance renewal and the plan review sit on the same calendar, so the year is visible rather than remembered.
The obligation is not satisfied by having a plan from 2015. Large developments must review at least every three years, and a plan behind the current cost of building is a plan that under-collects.
Committee minutes have to reach owners, and within a set period. It is a small obligation that quietly accumulates into a transparency complaint.
Pre-contract and pre-settlement disclosure are the seller's obligation, but the information comes from the body corporate. A self-managing body corporate has to be able to produce it quickly.
A self-managed building is run by the people who live in it. That changes the texture of the place: decisions get made by neighbours who will live with them, and a question about your own home gets answered by somebody who already knows the building.
Self-management fails on admin, not on goodwill. Quarter is built to carry the admin so a volunteer committee is doing the judgement, not the data entry.
Agendas built from your open items, notices sent on the statutory clock, motions and votes recorded as they happen, and minutes drafted from the meeting rather than from memory.
Strike a budget and Quarter raises the levies from it, invoices owners, chases arrears and reconciles what lands in the bank account.
Every decision, document, invoice and piece of correspondence in one place, searchable, and still there when the committee turns over.
Insurance renewals, the long-term maintenance fund, and the reporting Unit Titles Services expects, tracked with dates rather than remembered in somebody's calendar.
Owners ask Quarter about their building — balances, decisions, documents — and get an answer immediately, instead of adding a question to the committee's pile.
General information about New Zealand, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with Unit Titles Services or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in New Zealand and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
