The 60-unit apartment building in Onehunga had held its AGM on the last Tuesday of November for as long as anyone could remember. It started at 6pm. You had to physically be there or send a proxy. The proxy form required a signature and a witness. Last year, sixteen owners showed up or sent proxies. Quorum was fifteen. A $90,000 facade repair was voted through — a decision that affected every one of the 60 owners, most of whom found out about it when the levy notice arrived.
An AGM is the moment the body corporate formally meets to make its biggest decisions: approving the budget, setting levies, electing the committee, reviewing the long-term maintenance plan, and anything else requiring an ordinary or special resolution from the owners. Legally, you have to hold at least one a year. In practice, running one that people actually engage with takes some thought.
The basics: notice of the AGM must be given to every owner within specific timeframes. The notice has to include the agenda, the proposed resolutions, and any documents required for owners to make informed decisions — including financial statements and the proposed budget. If you're adding something to the agenda that wasn't on the original notice, you generally can't pass it as a resolution at the same meeting.
Quorum matters. A meeting without quorum can't transact business. Under the Act, quorum is 25% of eligible voters — people entitled to vote for at least a quarter of the principal units, present in person, remotely or by proxy. (An owner with unpaid levies isn't an eligible voter, which catches buildings out more often than you would think.) If you can't get quorum, there are procedures for reconvening, but it delays everything and tends to breed frustration.
The recent Unit Titles Act changes are worth using here. Remote attendance at meetings has been explicitly permitted since late 2022, and the updated Regulations set out procedures for electronic voting. This isn't a pandemic workaround — it is a permanent change, and for many buildings it is transformational. An AGM that people can join from their phone, with a voting system that doesn't require a printed proxy form and a witness, gets dramatically higher participation than one that requires 60 people to be in the same room on a Tuesday night in November.
The Onehunga building moved to an online format the following year. 54 of its 60 owners participated — via the meeting platform directly or by electronic proxy. Every resolution was passed clearly. The minutes were distributed the next morning. The committee chair said it was the most functional AGM the building had ever run.
Beyond the format, a few things consistently lift engagement. Send a preview of the agenda at least a week before so owners have time to think about what matters to them. Keep the meeting focused — an AGM is for decisions, not for relitigating every maintenance issue from the last twelve months. Distribute the minutes quickly. If owners feel like their participation had an effect, they come back next year.
The other reason to run a good AGM is a practical one: decisions made at a poorly run meeting are more vulnerable to challenge. An AGM where notice was short, quorum was borderline, or the correct documents weren't provided can be contested — and in a building where people are already unhappy about a $90,000 facade levy, that is exactly the kind of thing that ends up at the Tenancy Tribunal.
Quarter is the new body corporate — transparent, owner-first, and built for the way people actually live together. See how it works at quarter.nz.