There's always one. The owner who hits reply-all with a three-page grievance about the cleaner. They use angry words in bold and lots of exclamation marks. The committee member who turns every AGM into a Royal Commission. The person who lodged seventeen complaints in two years and won not one of them.
Most of us write them off as a nuisance. The Macquarie Bank 2026 Strata Industry Benchmarking Report says we should write them off as a cost.
What does the data say?
The report surveyed over 200 strata businesses which manage a combined 1.4 million lots. They represent more than 65% of the Australian industry. When asked to name their top operational challenges, 54% of respondents nominated difficult behaviour from lot owners or committee members. It was the most cited challenge in the industry, ahead of wage costs, legislative changes, and technology.
Why should this concern owners, not just managers?
Strata management is all about relationships. Good or bad, relationships have financial consequences.
The report is clear: when a strata manager leaves a firm, they take important knowledge with them. That includes details about your building, your committee's history, your ongoing disputes, your maintenance history, and their relationships with your key contractors. That institutional knowledge that's often not written down; it walks out the door with them.
Staff turnover for strata managers sits at 24%, well above the national employment average of 15%. To be fair to the industry, difficult owners are one driver of that turnover, but far from the only one. Wage pressures, workload, career progression, and management support, or the lack of it, all play a role. A strata manager drowning with 890 lots, inadequately supported by their firm, has many reasons to leave before a difficult owner even enters the picture.
But the report leaves no doubt that challenging client behaviour adds significantly to the pressure. And high turnover has real costs for everyone it touches.
What does turnover cost a building?
For the management firm, a resignation means recruitment costs, training time, lost productivity, and competitive vulnerability. Businesses experiencing high turnover report declining lots under management. Clients follow their managers when they leave.
For lot owners, the cost is subtler but just as real. A new strata manager doesn't know off the top of their head that the roof membrane was patched, not replaced. They don't know that the committee chair and the lot 12 owner have a fifteen-year history. They don't know which contractor shows up and which one never does. They start from zero, and your building pays for that learning curve through slower response times, costlier decisions, and increased risk.
The top-performing firms in the Macquarie study retained 83% of their strata managers. In contrast, the others retained 76%. That 7-point difference in retention translated directly into higher profitability, faster growth, and, critically, better client outcomes. Stability of staff is not a nice-to-have; it is a financial asset that belongs, in part, to every owner in the building.
Read: Reimagining Client Experience
So, is the difficult owner subsidised by everyone else?
In a very real sense, yes. Persistent, unreasonable behaviour drives up management costs, increases staff turnover, and degrades service quality across the portfolio. The consequences affect every lot in the building. This results in higher fees, slower service, and less experienced management.
The owner who fires off angry emails at midnight, questions every decision at meetings, and weaponises the dispute resolution process isn't just making their strata manager miserable. They are extracting value from everyone around them.
What can owners corporations do about it?
Committees can do more than most think to rein in bad behaviour. Committees have genuine power to set the tone of a building. That means running meetings professionally, discouraging personal attacks, and calling out unreasonable behaviour when necessary. It also means supporting your strata manager when a complaint is vexatious, not treating every complaint as valid simply because it arrived loudly.
Read: Why Compulsory Training Won’t Fix Your Committee, and What Actually Will
Some firms are already rating their clients. The best ones are walking away from schemes where the relationship is too toxic to fix. That is not a sign of an industry in crisis. It is a sign of an industry beginning to price risk appropriately.
Read: From Awesome to Difficult: The Simple Client Rating System
The data is in. A difficult owner isn't just their manager's problem; they are everyone's problem. The question is whether the rest of the strata community have the appetite to say so.
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.
