A body corporate's guide to budgeting common-area maintenance

Under Queensland's Body Corporate and Community Management Act, your scheme has to keep two separate budgets: an administrative fund for day-to-day running costs, and a sinking fund for major and capital spending. The administrative fund handles the predictable annual stuff, things like insurance, gardening, cleaning, minor repairs and management fees. The sinking fund builds up reserves for the big, infrequent jobs: exterior repainting, structural repairs, replacing fences, lifts, roofing and the like.

The catch most committees learn the hard way is that money can't be moved between the two funds. If you under-budget the sinking fund, you can't quietly borrow from the admin surplus to cover a roof. You raise a special levy instead, which is exactly the surprise owners hate. So the two funds need to be set independently and honestly.

The sinking fund also can't just be a number someone feels good about. The Act requires the sinking fund budget to reserve enough to cover likely spending for at least nine years beyond the current financial year, which works out to a rolling ten-year forecast. A professional forecast is allowed and, for most buildings of any size, worth the money, though it isn't compulsory; two-lot schemes don't need formal budgets at all.

Before you can budget, you need to know what's yours to maintain. The body corporate must keep common property in good, structurally sound condition. On most schemes that includes the building structure itself: foundations, load-bearing walls, the roof structure, external walls and cladding, external painting and the waterproofing membranes on common areas.

The exact line between body-corporate responsibility and lot-owner responsibility depends on your survey plan type, a Building Format Plan splits things differently from a Standard Format Plan, and on the regulation module your scheme runs under. It's worth getting that boundary in writing from your body corporate manager before a dispute over, say, a leaking balcony lands on the committee's desk. The waterproofing membrane on a common-area balcony is usually the body corporate's; the tiles a resident has laid over it may not be.

Dividing fences are a quiet line item people forget. Under the Neighbourhood Disputes (Dividing Fences and Trees) Act 2011, a body corporate counts as the owner of scheme land for fencing, so the default cost split for a sufficient dividing fence is shared with the adjoining owner. Budget for it like any other shared boundary cost.

The single biggest lever on a maintenance budget isn't which trade you use, it's whether the work is planned or reactive. Property operations sources are consistent on the direction: the same job costs more when it's an emergency than when it's scheduled. One widely cited analysis puts reactive maintenance at roughly 25 to 30 per cent more than a preventive programme overall, with the emergency components driving that, after-hours call-outs carrying a 50 to 100 per cent surcharge, emergency labour running at two to three times the normal rate, and rush parts marked up on top.

The reason is simple. A balcony bracket replaced during a scheduled pre-summer check is a cheap, booked job. The same bracket failing in a storm becomes an after-hours emergency with water already in the unit below and a potential insurance claim attached. A common target in building operations is to keep at least a 70/30 split between planned and reactive work once a maintenance programme has settled, and to treat a reactive share well above that as a budget signal, not bad luck.

Practically, this means putting real money into inspection and routine maintenance lines in the administrative fund, even though it feels like spending on nothing. Annual facade washing, gutter cleaning, balcony and balustrade checks before storm season, these are the lines that keep the expensive sinking-fund jobs further apart.

Salt air is the Gold Coast tax. Coatings, fixings and concrete all age faster within a few hundred metres of the water, so the budget items below come up sooner and harder here than they would inland. Treat every figure as a general market range, framed as guidance, not as a quote for your building. Your actual cost depends on access, height, prep, finish and the condition you're starting from.

Exterior repainting is usually the largest single sinking-fund event. As a general Australian guide, commercial and strata exterior repaints commonly run somewhere in the order of $25 to $60 per square metre depending on access, prep and finish, with multi-storey and difficult-access work sitting higher again; whole-building exterior jobs scale from tens of thousands of dollars for a mid-size building into six figures for large or high-rise work (AS Estimation; Painters Link). Coastal exteriors also need recoating sooner, painters put the realistic full-repaint cycle at around five to seven years for buildings close to the water, against eight to twelve inland, and exposed high-rise facades are worth a close inspection at the eight-to-ten-year mark regardless of the original coating (Next Level Painting; McAuliffe Painting).

Concrete spalling, the rusting reinforcement that locals call concrete cancer, is the one that blows budgets when it's left. As 2026 planning guidance, minor localised repair sits around $250 to $600 per square metre, moderate facade remediation around $600 to $1,200, and severe structural work from $1,200 to $2,500 and up per square metre; balconies tend to cost more again because of the waterproofing, tiling and drainage detail involved, and a cheap rate often excludes access, engineering and make-good (K2RA 2026 guide). On the routine side, commercial gutter cleaning typically runs about $44 to $80 per linear metre, with whole jobs often $1,000 to $4,000 and large or tall buildings well above that, while commercial pressure cleaning commonly sits around $5 per square metre for straightforward work, more where height or difficult access is involved (Spec Services; Airtasker).

Queensland's licensing rules matter for budgeting because using an unlicensed trade can void warranties and insurance, which turns a cheap job into an expensive one. In Queensland, building work valued over $3,300 including labour and materials must be done by a QBCC-licensed contractor (a lower $1,100 threshold applies where hydraulic services design is involved). So most one-off common-area jobs of any size legally need a licensed trade.

Some work needs a licence regardless of value, with no dollar threshold at all. That list includes plumbing and drainage, gas fitting and fire protection, so even a $200 plumbing fix legally requires a licensed plumber. Waterproofing is also licensed building work in Queensland, which is exactly why coastal balcony and roof leaks shouldn't go to the cheapest general handyman.

When you budget, build the cost of doing it properly into the line, not the cost of doing it cheaply and again. A licensed job that holds its warranty is the cheaper job over a ten-year forecast.

The hidden cost in most maintenance budgets isn't the trades, it's the coordination: chasing three quotes for one job, translating tradie invoices into something the committee can read, and verifying that everyone's insurance is current before they set foot on site. That time has a price even when it doesn't show up on an invoice.

Our model is built to remove that overhead. You call or message one number; Paul either does the work himself or dispatches the right vetted, licensed specialist from his network, manages it on site, and sends one itemised invoice with photos attached. You speak to us, not the specialist. For a treasurer trying to keep a ten-year forecast honest, the value is in budget lines that read cleanly and can be checked at a glance. We work Monday to Saturday, 7:30am to 4:30pm; we're a managed maintenance service, not a 2am emergency call-out.

If you're setting next year's budget and want a real number to test a line against, our quotes are free and fixed-price. Better to have a written figure in front of the committee than a guess.