What is the role of the chairman in a Body Corporate?

Summary:

The role of the chairman in a Body Corporate is voted in by the owners of the building. Their role is to facilitate the running of the building and ensuring that everyone is doing their designated role. It is looking at the group of people involved and seeing where the strengths lie and certain jobs are done by the correct people.

At the meetings the chair runs the meeting and present new information and plans to the group.

If you are thinking of going for the role of chairman with your building you need to guarantee you have the time to do so as it at times can be quite time consuming.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Good day. Andrew Murray from Apartment Specialists, talking about, what is a Chairman in a Body Corporate. Now, a Chairman is elected at the AGM, the Annual General Meeting which is held once a year, by the Body Corporate Secretary, or the Body Corporate company.

So, what happens is, everybody turns up to the meeting. You also have proxies which are votes from people who are out of town, things like that, where you have other representatives, and they'll generally have maybe one, two or three people going for the Chairman position. People will vote on who they think is best to represent. So, for example, I'm the Chairman in my own building complex, so I'm just going to describe to you, what it's like to be a Chairman and what my responsibilities are.

So being a Chairman is very important, but it's not like a dictator or even really a Prime Minister. You don't have the final say on anything, but you do have a lot more responsibility. So my job is a job of facilitation. It is to facilitate the owner's committee, to make sure that everybody's got responsibilities. I would say if there's a project being done, maybe it's a refurbishment, or a lift replacement, or getting a new quote from a different provider, things like that - it's making sure and following up to make sure that job is done.

It's looking at the strengths of each person on that committee, and looking at who's best suited for what role. Who's the best person to look at the accounts, who's the best person to decide colour scheme for the new gym, these kind of things. Then at the meeting I'll come in and I'll be chairing the meeting, so I'll be reading through these decisions - Okay, has everybody got questions or want to have a say here. Okay, these are the options, now let's have a vote. And, you have a vote on whatever that decision is, and the vote wins. So it's pretty clear so I'd say, the Chairman's role is really a role of facilitation.

It does have a lot of influence, and, it does meet with the Body Corporate, individually as well, and so it's an important role. But if you are thinking of going up, you've got to allow quite a bit of time because you're the person who's the first go-to when it comes to complaints, when it comes to disagreements on that owner's committees, when it comes to any situations. Especially if you're dealing with issues where you've got something that's happening to the building that needs to be addressed urgently, you pretty much have to drop everything - all that kind of thing.

But, it's an important part, very rewarding, and, I'm really enjoying it because it's helping me know even more about my industry than anyone else I guess. So anyway, just to round up, if you think you've got the time, give it a go. I'm sure you'll find it very rewarding. Thank you.

Next time what I'll do is, I'll talk about what a quorum is. You often hear this thing called quorum mentioned, in regards to having meetings that are legal? in the whole apartment world, so I thought I'd go over that because most people go, Well what's that. Anyway, talk soon.

Cheers!