If you sit ona strata committee, you have probably watched this happen without quite naming it. An AGM notice goes out and three owners RSVP. A special meeting gets called to approve urgent roof works and it barely scrapes a quorum. In smaller schemes, finding anyone willing to stand for the committee has become the hard part, let alone finding people willing to turn up and vote.
So the manager steps in. They chair the meeting, make the call, approve the invoice, and keep the building running. On the surface that looks like good service. Underneath, something far bigger is happening, and almost nobody in the sector has properly reckoned with it.
What is delegated authority meant to do?
Delegated authority should be a careful, temporary transfer of a specific power. It is not a permanent replacement for a working committee. Most strata management agreements include a delegation schedule. This schedule shows what the committee has given to the manager. Research into how these schedules operate found that most agreements delegate real functions to the agent, and that owners corporations rarely discuss delegation with their manager before signing. The extent of the authority is typically set by the manager's own business model, sitting in a schedule most committees never negotiate line by line.
Read: Delegated Powers – A Privilege or a Poison Pill?
Why does this concern committee members?
This concerns committee members because many owners only discover the scope of their manager's delegated authority when a bill arrives for work nobody explicitly approved. One strata lawyer described the pattern plainly. Another practitioner called the delegation concept dangerous. They argued that the law should never have allowed it to become the default. Yet, in a growing number of buildings, delegation is the only decision-making mechanism at work, because the committee meant to provide a check simply is not there.
Is delegation still a backstop, or has it become the substitute?
Delegation still acts as a backstop in buildings with engaged committees. However, in many smaller schemes, it has taken their place. This is often because office bearers were never appointed. In those buildings the manager is not filling a gap left by an absent committee. The manager is the governance structure, by default.That raises an uncomfortable question every committee should ask itself. Is the manager filling a gap owners left open, or does the ease of that gap-filling explain why the gap never closes?
Read: Caught in the Crossfire: How Standard Agreements Turn Strata Delegation into a Professional Disgrace
Who carries the risk when delegation goes wrong?
The risk when delegation goes wrong does not always sit where the authority sits. When a manager uses delegated authority, the law usually views it as the owners corporation acting. However, liability doesn’t always follow that same path. In NSW’s statutory schemes, if the owners corporation has a duty that leads to an offence, the agent can be held responsible while the delegation is active. Add in broad indemnification clauses that aren’t linked to what was delegated, and now you have practitioners talking about a triangle of delegation, indemnity, and liability that no one has clearly outlined. In some cases, managers have taken their fees directly from trust accounts without committee approval. Lawyers suggest this would breach fiduciary duty in nearly any other profession.
Read: Whose Motion is it Anyway?
Why does this matter more as buildings age?
This matters more as buildings age because the decisions now running through delegated authority are getting bigger, not smaller. Deferred and unfunded maintenance is already known as strata's sleeper problem. It’s affecting buildings where the real decision-maker on major works is often a manager exercising delegated authority. This shift occurs because assembling a quorum has become the exception rather than the rule. Multi-million-dollar remediation decisions are being made through a mechanism built for calling meetings and paying routine bills, not for governing a building's financial future.
Does every state handle this the same way?
Every state does not handle this the same way, and committees should know that. Queensland and Western Australia have rejected the full-delegation model outright. Bodies corporate there cannot delegate their functions at all; managers and committees can only be authorised to act, a narrower and more accountable arrangement. NSW and Victoria run on delegation with reserved instruction rights layered on top, a hybrid that sounds like it preserves committee control but in practice blurs who is deciding what.
Where does this get tested next?
This gets tested next at the Strata Impact Conference 2026, where I am chairing a legal panel built to cross-examine exactly this question. Four of the country's leading strata lawyers will be asked whether delegated authority is quietly becoming the default governance model for disengaged buildings, and who carries the risk when it is. For committees, the stakes are direct. If your building goes quiet at meeting time and lets the manager fill the silence, this is the silence about to get named, before deferred maintenance forces the question anyway.
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.
