Become Easy to Trust and Hard to Move

What makes owners trust a body corporate? Two things, and they pull in different directions. The scheme has to be easy to read, and it has to be hard to bend. Easy to read means the conduct rules are available to every owner and tenant, in plain language, and the trustees explain their decisions in the minutes instead of leaving people to guess. A new tenant should learn on the first day that visitors park outside the gate, not from an angry note on a windscreen.

Hard to bend means the rule binds everyone, the trustee's brother in law and the longest resident included. Where one popular owner has kept a large dog for years against the pet rule because nobody wanted the fight, the next request for a dog cannot be refused without looking unfair, because it is unfair. From then on every rule is open to negotiation, and the trustees spend their evenings arguing about exceptions instead of running a building. Buyers read this in the minutes too. A stack of disputes about who may break which rule tends to lower offers, or send buyers to the complex next door.