Strata is a Tough Gig

Strata is a tough gig. Most people in this industry know at least one person (if not more) who has left strata due to the demands it had on them from mental exhaustion to burnout, to frustration with the role/lack of change in clients, to just simply having enough.

Strata and the clients can have a big impact on us and our team members’ wellness, generally taking a mental toll. It is easy to say, don’t take it personally, but this can be hard when negative comments are a large part of what we deal with, and you are invested in your work.

Some client’s lack of understanding when purchasing into strata means that our role is not just compliance management, but also an educator. In addition to everything else — peacemakers, problem solvers, therapists, maintenance masters — we are expected to know everything about everything.

Our clients are not people who reach out when everything is going well, we deal with issues and solve people’s biggest problems that impact one of/or their biggest assets. When we manage people expressing big emotions — due to their situation — it is important to frame the interaction positively — they have to come to us in their time of need and trust that we will work through the issue with them.

What about us? It is nice our client has the benefit of going to someone with all their problems, we just get stuck holding the not-so-great end of the stick, while they complain about our management fees being too high – cough cough, usually less than 2-3 coffees per week per lot.

As an industry, we need to raise awareness about the mental health impacts our industry has, destigmatise mental health and consider the implementation of mental health days. As a new generation of the workforce makes their way into the industry, we need to adjust our expectations.

We need to be flexible and understanding, mental health impacts a vast majority of the Australian population. Over two in five Australians aged 16-85 years (43.7% or 8.6 million people) have experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life, and anxiety was the most common group of 12-month mental disorders (16.8% or 3.3 million people).¹

Another matter to consider is creating safe networking environments for our team and members of SCA. Networking and engaging with peers reinforces that we are not alone. Not alone in the role and in feelings people may get when trying to make their way through daily tasks. It can be incredibly overwhelming knowing you are coming into work only to be “harassed” by clients — who generally do not understand our role or why we are not letting them erect a shed in the middle of the common car park (for example).

I led the New Strata Professionals initiative that I worked incredibly hard to have approved by our SCA (WA) board. This initiative is to promote accreditation pathways and create a safe environment, for people new to the industry to share experiences, to retain strata talent long-term. I wanted to make an environment where we could nurture new entrants and give them the opportunity to make strong professional networks that they could lean on if they ever needed to.

One comment that came out of the recent event — managing client expectations — was “it’s good to know I am not the only one”. Hearing this, was incredibly satisfying because fostering unity among these members is a goal I wanted to achieve. Unity among strata professionals creates a stronger sense of community. We feel part of an industry larger than just ourselves, but without us, the schemes we help would not be as successful as they are. Our role is extremely important.

We as an industry should be creating more general strata owner education that is freely available, similar to the SCA (WA) “communicating with your strata manager guideline”. Generalised information about our role, will assist the public — more importantly strata owners — on what our role is. Generalised information may save our members time. If an owner becomes accustomed to Googling answers before picking up the phone or firing off an email, we save our members time and raise the professionalism of our industry — having the information readily available.

We probably all have processes in place to manage the ever-increasing volume of client enquiries, but the evolving world of instant answers brings a strong need for centralised data that strata owners can be trained to access.

Finally, as individual businesses, it is important that we are creating safe environments for our team and our industry leaders are supporting their teams. The top reason that people leave jobs is due to mediocre management², this in conjunction with the environment that strata professionals are subjected to, we need to do everything possible to retain staff.

It is especially important to retain team members as 68% noted this as their top priority³, comparatively we know that 28% of property service employees are considering leaving their place of employment and 31% in the property industry are not looking but do keep up with active/potential opportunities⁴. If your team are happy/satisfied, they are not going to leave your office or the industry. We have a collective responsibility to try to retain staff to ensure that our clients receive a professional standard of service — despite the few who may excessively communicate with us.

In summary, we as an industry have a responsibility to work together to try and stop the loss of talent, and reframe some thinking patterns — there are 100’s of happy clients, we just deal with the disgruntled dozen or ones with active problems — promote mental wellness and foster strong networks.

We are in a rapidly growing industry, so it’s important to prioritise our team members. Check-in with your team, build rapport and prioritise wellness so that your team come to you instead of being/feeling isolated in a role that needs them! We cannot solve it all at once, but we need to start making changes before we continue to lose more great people to mental exhaustion and burnout.

1. 2020-2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/mental-health/national-study-mental-health-and-wellbeing/latest-release ↩︎
2. Seek The top 5 reasons people leave their jobs: https://www.seek.com.au/career-advice/article/new-research-reveals-the-top-5-reasons-people-leave-their-jobs ↩︎
3. MRI Real Estate Software — Voice of Strata Manager | 2023 Australian Edition ↩︎
4. NAB Behavioural Insight Report February 2022: https://business.nab.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NAB-Behavioural-Insights-Australias-Great-Resignation.pdf ↩︎