Most people who live in an apartment building know less about it than they know about almost anything else they own.
Ask an owner what their by-laws say about pets, or where their levies actually go, or what their building's insurance excess is, and a lot of the time the honest answer is a shrug. Not because they don't care. Because nobody ever gave them a copy of anything, and the process for getting one feels like it requires a reason.
So here's the thing worth knowing: you don't need a reason. The access already belongs to you. It's just been made to feel like a favour.
What your building has to show you
In New South Wales, an owner, or someone you authorise, may inspect the owners corporation's records on written request. The list is longer than most people expect:
- the strata roll
- the records and documents the owners corporation is required to keep
- plans, specifications, certificates and diagrams handed over by the original owner
- the ten-year capital works fund plan
- the last financial statements
- current insurance policies and the receipts for the premiums
- the strata managing agent's appointment documents and any building manager agreement
- service agreement details and strata renewal plans
The fee is $31 including GST for the first hour, and $16 for each additional half hour. Records must be kept for seven years, and NSW Government guidance is that since 11 June 2024 they must be kept electronically.
In Victoria, the position is even more direct: an owners corporation cannot charge you to inspect the records and register at all. It can charge a reasonable fee for copies, up to prescribed maximums. Requests for an owners corporation certificate must be answered within ten business days.
Read that list again and notice the third-from-last item. You are entitled to read the insurance policy you are paying for. Most owners never have. It is not a small document and it is not a small amount of money, and the excess on it is a number that will matter enormously to you on exactly one day, which you cannot predict.
Why people don't ask
Because asking feels like an accusation.
That's the whole mechanism, and it's worth naming. In a strata building, requesting information reads as suspicion. The person asking feels like they're implying something. The committee receiving it feels like they're being audited. Everyone gets slightly formal, and somebody uses the word "appropriate."
Which is a shame, because none of it is what's actually happening. You are not investigating anybody. You're an owner reading a document about a thing you own a share of.
The reframe that helps: transparency in a building isn't an audit, it's a floor. It just means anyone affected by something can find out what state it's in. Not the personalities, not the arguments. Just, what's the by-law, where's the money going, what's happening with the roof.
And it's worth knowing this isn't only a matter of etiquette. Victoria's statutory review of the Owners Corporations Act, whose final report was tabled in December 2025, made Finding 15: some owners corporation managers are denying access to records without a statutory basis. Recommendation 9 was to increase the penalties for record-keeping breaches. If you have asked for something and been told no, and the reason didn't sound like a reason, you may well have been right to wonder.
Three things to ask for this month
Not a campaign. Three specific documents, each of which will tell you something about your building you probably don't know.
1. Your by-laws. Start here, because it's the one that comes up. Parking, pets, renovations, noise, short-term letting, what you can put on your balcony. Every dispute you will ever have with a neighbour is downstream of a document most owners have never opened. Read it before you need it, not during.
2. The ten-year capital works fund plan. This is the building telling you what it thinks is coming and what it will cost. Two follow-up questions make it useful rather than decorative: when was it last reviewed?, in NSW it must be reviewed at least every five years, and does what it says match what's actually been happening? A plan that scheduled the roof for last year, alongside a roof nobody has touched, is a more informative document than a plan on its own.
3. The current insurance policy. The sum insured, the excess, what's covered and what isn't. If you own a lot, you are paying for this. You should know what you bought.
You don't have to make a project of it. Ask for one. The building either produces it easily, which tells you something good, or it doesn't, which tells you something more useful.
Where NaloHub comes into it
I built NaloHub because the access problem isn't really a legal problem. It's a logistics problem wearing a legal problem's clothes.
The rights above already exist. What doesn't exist, in most buildings, is anywhere an owner can go at 9pm on a Tuesday to answer a question without emailing a volunteer and waiting.
So the portal does the dull version of that. Your scheme's by-laws are loaded and readable by every resident, which, given how many owners have never seen theirs, turns out to be the single most-used thing in the product. Documents, minutes, safety information, the things a committee chooses to release, sit in one place, so an owner can find the answer themselves instead of asking and waiting. Maintenance shows the state of what's been reported: not the money, not the debate, just where it's up to and what it's waiting on.
And there's Nalo, our in-house know-it-all, which has read the strata legislation of every Australian state and territory. The thing that matters about Nalo isn't that it answers the question. It's that every answer cites the exact by-law or section it came from, so you're never taking anyone's word for it, including ours. That's the difference between being told and being able to check. (It's information, not legal advice, and it says so.)
Committees decide what residents can see, which is as it should be. But the direction of travel is deliberate: the default in this product is that the people who live in a building can find out about the building they live in.
One last thing
If you're on a committee reading this and it landed as a criticism, it isn't one.
Every committee that has actually tried opening things up has found the same thing, and it's the opposite of what they feared. When residents can see that a job is waiting on a second quote, they stop emailing about it. When they can see nothing, they assume nothing is happening, and they email repeatedly, and now you've got a second job, which is managing the emails about the first one.
Opacity doesn't protect a committee. It just moves the work.
You can walk through a fully populated demo building at demo.nalohub.com, no signup, nothing to install.