There is a moment at the end of every AGM that nobody plans for.
The votes are counted, the new committee is elected, and three people who have between them just accepted a legal duty, a six-figure budget and responsibility for a building's common property walk out into the car park holding nothing. No list of open jobs. No summary of what's half-finished. No note about the retaining wall that someone was worried about in March.
Not because anyone withheld it. Because in most buildings there was nothing to hand over.
This is the strangest thing about strata, and once you see it you can't stop seeing it: the committee is quite possibly the last role in Australia that carries a statutory obligation, controls real money, and gets no handover.
What the law does get back for you
More than people realise, and it's worth knowing exactly where it stops.
In New South Wales, section 180 requires the owners corporation to keep records for seven years, minutes of owners corporation and committee meetings, financial statements and accounting records, copies of correspondence sent and received, meeting notices, voting papers, and signed strata managing agent and building manager agreements. NSW Government guidance is that since 11 June 2024 those records must be kept electronically.
And section 181 is the sharp one. Where the owners corporation gives notice to a person holding its records, including a strata managing agent whose appointment has ended, that person must deliver them up within 14 days, with a maximum penalty of $2,200 for each failure.
Fourteen days, with a penalty attached. That provision exists because the alternative happens.
In Victoria the shape is similar and the retention periods differ: most documents for a minimum of seven years, voting papers and proxies for twelve months, and a permanent category that includes plans of subdivision, AGM minutes, building permits, contracts and occupancy permits. Owners corporations there cannot charge owners to inspect the records and register at all.
So the law will get you the documents. What it cannot get you is the thing you actually needed.
The documents aren't the memory
Here is what a new committee is usually missing, and none of it is on the section 180 list.
Which of the open jobs is actually open. Minutes will tell you the pool gate was discussed in February. They won't tell you whether anything happened after that, who was chasing it, or whether the quote is still valid.
What's waiting on whom. Ninety per cent of strata frustration isn't disagreement about what to do. It's not knowing who currently has the thing.
Why a decision went the way it did. The minute records the resolution. It rarely records that the dearer quote was chosen because that contractor holds the parts locally and could be there on Thursday, which is exactly the sentence the next committee needs when the same contractor comes up again.
The correspondence that was never the scheme's. This is the big one. A committee's dealings with the insurer, the solicitor, the council, the auditor, the contractor, a great deal of it lives in an outgoing secretary's personal email account. It was never a record of the owners corporation. Section 181 can't reach it, because legally it isn't there to reach. When that person's term ends, so does the building's access to its own correspondence.
Victoria's statutory review of the Owners Corporations Act, whose final report was tabled in December 2025 with 23 recommendations, found a related problem worth knowing about: Finding 15 was that some owners corporation managers are denying access to records without a statutory basis, and Recommendation 9 was to increase penalties for record-keeping breaches. Even where the law is clear, getting the file isn't always simple.
And the part nobody says out loud
In a lot of buildings, the real handover document is a person.
Your building manager has been carrying this building's operational memory, unpaid, unacknowledged, and entirely in their head, for however many years they've been there. Every committee that has ever asked "did we fix that?" has been asking them. They are, functionally, the building's database, and they are the only database in the building that goes home at 5pm and takes annual leave.
That is not a criticism of anyone. Nobody gave them anywhere else to put it. But it's a genuine risk to the scheme, and every honest committee knows it. A building that can survive its building manager's absence is also a building that can afford to give them a holiday.
So we built the boring version
I run NaloHub, a private resident portal for apartment buildings. It isn't a strata management platform and it doesn't replace your body corporate manager. It does one narrow thing seriously: it gives a building a place to keep its own operational record, and that record belongs to the building rather than to whoever happens to be on the committee this year.
Three parts of it are specifically about handover.
The building gets its own email address. Correspondence with the insurer, the solicitor, the council, the contractor comes into and goes out of an address that belongs to the building, not a personal inbox. Threads are held in a Correspondence Hub that's append-only and tamper-evident at the database level. When a secretary's term ends, the building's correspondence doesn't leave with them, because it was never in their account.
Maintenance runs through named stages, and every change is stamped. Reported, triaged, quotes in, recommended, at vote, contractor confirmed. Who moved it, when. A new committee opens the portal and sees the state of every open job, including the one that's been waiting eleven weeks, which is normally the first honest conversation a new committee has.
Decisions attach to the thing they were about. A motion created from a maintenance job stays linked to it, so when someone asks about that decision three years later, it's still sitting next to the work it related to rather than filed by date in a minute book. Dispute records are append-only, so your account of what happened doesn't depend on anyone's memory.
And the part that matters most to a committee weighing this up: the record is yours. You can leave whenever you like and take it with you. No hostage situations. Whatever your building knows shouldn't leave when you do, and that includes leaving us.
There's a Getting Started tracker built for exactly this moment, too: a shared launch checklist with owners against each step and a summary you can copy into a committee email, so the incoming group can see what's done and what isn't without anyone reconstructing it.
The handover list you can write today
You don't need us to do this part. If you're on a committee right now, and especially if you're on one that's about to change, write down these five things and leave them where the next committee will find them:
- Every open maintenance job, and what each is waiting on. Not what it is. What it's waiting on.
- The oldest one, with the date it was first reported. It'll be older than you think, and it's the most honest thing about the building.
- Every decision the committee made outside a meeting this year, and where the evidence of it lives.
- Every supplier relationship, and who holds the contact.
- The things only one person knows. The gate code. The valve behind the pump room door. The neighbour who has to be told before scaffolding goes up. Write them down and it stops being a risk.
That list takes an evening. Almost no building has one.
If you'd like to see what it looks like when a building keeps that record as a matter of course, there's a fully populated demo building at demo.nalohub.com, no signup, nothing to install. Have a proper look, and tell me what your building does that it doesn't handle.