The chair of a 32-unit Auckland CBD apartment building resigned five months into his term. The reason: a fellow committee member had started sending mass emails to all 32 owners criticising the chair's decisions on everything from contractor selection to the font used in meeting minutes. The emails were unpleasant, factually questionable, and generated significant owner anxiety. Nobody on the committee knew what to do. The building went without a functioning committee for six months while everyone figured out what the Act actually said.
Body corporate governance disputes are uncomfortable precisely because the people involved live in the same building and see each other in the lift. But a dysfunctional committee has real consequences — decisions get delayed, maintenance gets deferred, disputes between residents don't get addressed, and the building's financial management suffers. Understanding what options exist when the committee itself is the problem matters.
The Unit Titles Act doesn't say much about committee member conduct beyond requiring that committee members act in the best interests of the body corporate. The recent changes strengthened governance expectations, but the Act doesn't provide a simple mechanism for removing a committee member who is being difficult but hasn't done anything technically illegal.
The main mechanism for changing committee membership is an extraordinary general meeting of owners. Owners can vote to remove a committee member at such a meeting — but calling an EGM requires enough owners to want one, notice needs to be given, and the meeting has to be properly run. In a building where the committee dysfunction has also poisoned relationships between owners, getting a critical mass of owners to agree on anything is its own challenge.
If the committee reaches a point where it simply can't function — internal conflict has made decision-making impossible, or members have effectively abandoned their roles — the body corporate's functions fall back to the owners collectively. This is technically workable but practically very difficult, particularly in a large building. It also tends to increase the urgency of finding a professional manager to hold things together while the governance situation is sorted out.
A professional body corporate manager can play a stabilising role in exactly this kind of situation. They aren't a member of the committee, so they are outside the conflict. They can continue to run the building's operations — managing maintenance, processing payments, handling owner queries — while the committee situation is resolved. They can also facilitate the extraordinary general meeting process if the owners decide to use it.
The deeper point is that governance conflicts in body corporates are almost always worse when the committee is also doing the administrative work. When one or two people are running the meeting, managing the contractors, handling the finances, responding to owner emails, and trying to manage an internal conflict, the pressure is unsustainable. External management separates governance (the committee's job) from administration (the manager's job), and that separation itself tends to reduce the intensity of personality conflicts.
The Auckland CBD building eventually held an EGM, reconstituted its committee, and engaged a manager. The chair who had resigned returned. The committee member whose emails had caused the original problem also stayed — but with the manager handling communications and decisions documented formally, there was less room for the informal aggression that had characterised the previous arrangement.
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.