Fees take it to the next level

After buying an apartment, owners should be prepared to regularly dip into their savings to cover maintainance and unexpected building issues

- TOM WATSON

As the trend towards building higher-density homes has grown in recent years, so has the number of Australians calling apartments and townhouses home.

The vast majority of these properties are strata title – an ownership model with a body corporate or owners corporation. An estimated one in six Australians now lives in strata properties, according to the 2022 Australasian Strata Insights report.

From a buyer’s perspective, there are plenty of upsides to units and townhouses, the most obvious being their affordability compared with standalone houses. However, it’s worth doing the maths on strata fees and potential levies before jumping in. You may think you’re spending less buying an apartment compared to a house, but the annual and long-term fees all add up.

There’s no typical cost

Because buildings vary in size and age and have different facilities or common areas that need maintaining, one of the myths that needs to be dispelled is that there is a typical strata fee that lot owners need to pay, says Amanda Farmer, a strata lawyer at Your Strata Property.

“It’s often where new purchasers get tripped up because they get told by an agent, ‘These are what your quarterly levies are and these are fairly standard moving forward’. Then they buy in and get surprised by a rapid increase in levies. Or they realise that the levies with their building are much higher than what their friends are paying in their building.”

Strata debt is another problem. If you end up falling behind in your payments and owing too much in strata levies, you can be at risk of bankruptcy.