Later in life, returning home can stir strong emotions. That happened to me last week. I went to my hometown - at least my professional hometown, the Gold Coast where I was asked to reflect on the future of strata from my perspective as a manager. I spoke from a place where 40 years earlier I began my career as a strata lawyer under the patronage of the godfather of Queensland strata management, the late Howard Stewart. I now wear a different hat.  I’m less diplomatic.I’ve got less time to make a difference. 

At Strata Impact 2026, I was joined by strata lawyer Amanda Farmer and conference founder, host, and researcher Dr Nicole Johnston. We were each given twelve minutes to explain what is wrong with strata living in Australia, and where the fault lies. There were no punches pulled. The opinions held were strong. The audience was engaged. The decision unanimous. What we are doing is not working. Only our reasons differed.

Is the legal system broken?

The legal concept that is strata is not broken, according to Amanda Farmer. It is working exactly as it was designed to: a subdivision instrument built to create freehold title over apartments and give banks security to lend against them. Every protection owners now rely on, from dispute resolution pathways to disclosure obligations, was bolted onto that instrument later, and Farmer argues the bolts are coming loose. She prefers the word collapse to broken, because collapse implies a structure straining under a load it was never engineered to carry. The system was built to sell real estate well. Ongoing management of the people who will live together inside that real estate afterwards was never part of the original brief.

What does the researcher see?

The researcher sees the fault line opening at the very start of a building's life, not later, according to Dr Nicole Johnston. Budgets get struck to a price point before an owners corporation exists, contracts get signed before there is anyone to negotiate them, and compliance gets certified at completion. The finished building is then handed to volunteers who had no part in any of those early decisions. Johnston's research tracks how a single early weakness moves through five connected systems: financial, maintenance, records, governance and, eventually, a special levy landing on owners who did not cause the problem and cannot easily reach the people who did. Her conclusion is that strata is broken, but repairable, provided reform targets the whole system rather than chasing individual actors or events after damage is already done.

What does the manager see?

The manager in me sees the evidence sitting in the numbers. Base management fees have barely kept pace with CPI since 1985. Falling profits and rising staff costs, along with high turnover, show a quick-fix approach to a deeper issue. Companies are spending more on staff to stay afloat instead of redesigning how the work is delivered. That approach was already unsustainable before AI arrived, and it makes even less sense now in a world where routine, standardised work can be handed to machines. My solution borrows from the professional service spectrum: shift commodity and procedure work onto automation and steer the profession toward what the framework calls grey hair and rocket science, the cutting edge, expertise heavy work that only an experienced human can do.

Read: Life After AI: Strata's Next Chapter Is a Power Shift, Not a Pivot

Where does this leave strata?

This leaves strata with three separate repair jobs rather than one. A legal framework built for property transactions needs protections strong enough for the people living inside those properties long after settlement. An establishment process that plants five interlinked failures needs a systems level fix, not a search for a single culprit. And a business model that treats staffing as the only lever needs to find a second one before wages outpace what buildings can sustain paying. None of us expects a single reform to close all three fault lines at once. What we called for is a sector willing to keep asking the same hard question from more than one direction.

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