It's not often that an unsolicited direct message on LinkedIn makes you stop and think deeply about your big life and career decisions. It happened to me last week.
“Hi Michael, studying governance failures in Hong Kong, Florida, and England while simultaneously building a no-commission, conflict-free strata management firm from scratch is a fairly rare combination. What's driving your research, the academic side or the practical application of the new firm?”
The answer to this thoughtful question lies in my respect for the work of pracademics.
What is a pracademic?
A pracademic is someone who moves between research and practice, using each to test the other. The label sounds like jargon, but the idea is old. Medicine has run on it for a century. A cardiologist who also publishes trial data does not treat patients on Monday and forget the evidence by Tuesday. The clinic generates questions for the lab, and the lab sends answers back to the clinic. Strata governance has never had that loop. Committees make life-safety decisions on maintenance and remediation with almost no evidence base behind them, a gap I have written about before.
Read: The Research We Don't Have – And Why It's Costing Us
Why does medicine's model translate to buildings?
Medicine's model translates to buildings because both fields depend on collective decisions made under uncertainty, with real consequences for the people who get it wrong. A hospital trial has an ethics board, a control group, peer review, and a published result. A strata committee approving a remediation scope has none of that discipline, yet the stakes for occupants can be just as high. Running a strata business gives a researcher live case studies every week: real committees, real budgets, real conflicts of interest, all playing out close to real time.
What is my doctorate studying?
My doctorate is studying how legal frameworks shaped decision-making in the years before three catastrophic building failures: Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong, Champlain Towers South in Florida and Grenfell Tower in England. Each disaster followed warnings that went unheeded. Each involved fragmented ownership, multiple regulators and unclear duties to act. The research maps who held authority, who owed a duty of care, and how those allocations shaped the response to expert warnings and government orders in the years leading up to each collapse.
Why does adding Australia matter?
Adding Australia matters because our buildings have so far avoided mass casualties, and that fact deserves scrutiny rather than comfort. We have had our own warnings: Lacrosse, Opal Tower, Neo, Mascot Towers. Studying Australia alongside the three overseas failures lets us ask a tougher question: what’s different here? Is it the design, regulation, or just luck?
Why does collective decision-making matter more than the buildings themselves?
Collective decision-making matters more than the buildings themselves because concrete and steel do not fail on their own. People fail to fund inspections, defer repairs, or discount a consultant's warning because a special levy is unpopular. The same conflict of interest that inflates a remediation quote can just as easily bury a safety concern until it becomes unaffordable to fix.
Read: The One Conflict of Interest That Could Cost Your Building Millions
And the same funding pressure that makes committees chase the cheapest quote, or defer the works interminably is what allows serious defects to sit untreated for years.
Read: Why Your Strata Remediation Quote Is Probably Too High
What can a pracademic add that theory or practice alone cannot?
A pracademic can add a feedback loop that neither pure research nor pure practice can offer alone. Academic work identifies the doctrinal weaknesses. A working strata business can test whether a proposed fix actually changes behaviour in a real committee room, with real owners and real money at stake. So, when that LinkedIn message asked what was driving me, the honest answer was both, and the gap between them is exactly where I hope I can make a useful contribution.
Michael Teys has more than 30 years’ experience as a strata lawyer and academic and has owned 11 strata management agencies throughout Australia. He has a Master of Philosophy (Built Environment) and Bachelor of Laws. He lectures and writes widely about strata management issues in Australia and internationally.
