For strata managers and committees

Common property, or the lot? Settle this before anything else

The first question on any water ingress enquiry in a strata building is not what resin to use. It is who owns the defect. In practice, the elements we work on are almost always common property even when the damage shows up inside somebody's lot: the basement or car park slab, the soffit above the car spaces, the external and below-ground walls, the lift pit, the podium planter box and the structural joints between them. A dripping ceiling over car space 14 is a common property slab leaking into a lot owner's air space, not the lot owner's ceiling.

What complicates it is that the place water appears and the place water enters are routinely metres apart. Water tracks laterally between the membrane and the concrete, and between a structural slab and its topping, then exits at the weakest point it can find. A wet patch inside a lot can originate at a construction joint two bays away. That is why we mark up where water is entering, not just where it is showing, and why a defect note that only records the symptom is not enough to scope a repair from.

Where the boundary is genuinely arguable — a leak at a lot boundary, or damage inside a lot caused by a common property defect — that is a determination for the body corporate under its own by-laws and the applicable legislation, taken on advice from the body corporate manager. We are a contractor, not an adviser on it. What we can do is document the water path clearly enough that whoever makes the call is making it on evidence.

What a committee actually needs before it can vote

Committees do not reject remedial work because it is expensive. They defer it because the paper in front of them does not let them decide. A quote is not a decision document. What gets a motion carried is a short cost paper that a lay committee member can read in five minutes and defend to an owner who was not there.

Our quotes are itemised so the numbers drop straight into that paper without anyone having to interpret them.

• The defect, in one sentence, with a photograph and the date it was first reported.
• What was ruled out and why — drainage, a leaking service, condensation, a failed membrane — so the paper survives the owner who asks whether anyone checked the obvious things.
• The recommended repair, the quantities behind it (linear metres of crack, linear metres of joint, number of tie holes), and the unit rate they were priced at.
• The cost, split into the base scope and the site-condition loadings (access equipment, traffic management, after-hours access, confined space) so nothing looks like padding.
• What happens if the committee defers: what deteriorates, what gets more expensive, and what does not change.
• The disruption: which levels or bays close, for how long, and on which days.
• The fund the money comes from, and whether a special levy is required.
• What the body corporate receives at handover as evidence the work was done.

The three-comparable-quotes problem, and how to fix it

Most committees are advised, sensibly, to obtain three quotes. The advice fails in this trade because the three quotes almost never describe the same work. One prices per crack, one prices per linear metre, one prices a lump sum with no quantity attached. One includes cutting the packers back and patching the holes; one leaves that as a variation. One is drilling and using mechanical packers; one is gluing ports to the face of a wet wall, which is cheaper, faster and will not adhere.

The fix is to issue one scope of works with the quantities already counted, and ask all three contractors to price that document rather than their own interpretation of the problem. Our scope of works guide has an editable template and a walkthrough of how to read the answers that come back, free and with no form in front of it. Use it on us as well as on everyone else.

When the quotes land, normalise them on the table below before comparing the totals. A quote that is forty per cent cheaper is usually forty per cent less work.

Form 16, Form 43, and when an owner actually needs one

These two forms come up constantly in strata and almost nobody explains them. They surface in two situations: a lot owner selling or refinancing and being asked for paperwork, and a committee wanting documentary evidence that rectification on common property was carried out and complies.

Both are Queensland building certification forms. Form 16 is generally used as an inspection or aspect certificate — a competent person certifies that a nominated aspect of building work was inspected or carried out and complies with the relevant requirement. Form 43 belongs to the same family of building certification forms and is asked for by name far more often than it is understood.

We are deliberately not going to publish a rule about which form your job needs, and you should be wary of a contractor who does. Whether a certificate is required at all, which form applies, who is entitled to sign it and what aspect it can cover are determinations for the building certifier, and the forms and their use are amended from time to time. Two things are worth a committee knowing regardless of which number ends up on the page.

First, certification only arises where the work is the kind of assessable building work the certification framework covers. A large share of leak sealing on existing common property is maintenance and rectification, and no form arises at all. Being told a form is not required is not evasion.

Second, if a certificate is going to be required, it has to be organised before the work is covered up. Nobody can certify an aspect that nobody inspected. If the committee thinks it will want certification at the end — for a defect claim, for a future sale, or simply for the record — say so at scoping stage, not at handover.

Residents, notification and the disruption plan

The complaint a manager fields is rarely about the repair. It is about a resident who came down at 7 am and found their car space coned off with no warning. We write the resident notice as part of the scope and hand it to the manager to issue under their own letterhead, because a notice from the body corporate carries weight that a notice from a contractor does not.

The notice names the levels and bay numbers affected, the dates and hours, what noise to expect and when, whether vehicles must be moved and where to, the smell that comes with uncured resin and how long it lasts, and a single point of contact. Drilling concrete is loud and it is the part residents notice; we stage it so a working day rather than a working fortnight is noisy in any one area.

Occupied car parks are most of what this work involves. That means staged closures so only part of the deck is out at a time, certified traffic management where vehicles and workers share a level, and physical protection over parked cars, walls and finishes near the work. Cured polyurethane is very difficult to remove, so we mask and sheet beforehand rather than cleaning afterwards.

On the safety side, the uncured resin contains isocyanates, which are a genuine respiratory hazard for the people handling them and the reason our technicians wear fitted respiratory protection. Once reacted, which takes minutes, it is an inert plastic. Practically, residents and pets stay out of the immediate work area during injection and until the space has been ventilated, usually the same day. Safety data sheets for every product on site are available on request and a building manager should ask for them as routine.

Money: the bands, the sinking fund and the special levy

In Queensland a body corporate typically runs an administrative fund for recurrent operating costs and a sinking fund for capital and non-recurrent spending, and rectification of this kind normally sits against the sinking fund. Whether your current budget carries it, or whether a special levy has to be raised, is a question for the body corporate manager against the actual budget and the applicable legislation. It is not a contractor's call.

What we can do is get a defensible number in front of the committee early enough to be budgeted rather than sprung on an AGM. If the scope is likely to exceed the fund, say so at the first committee meeting and give owners a full levy cycle to absorb it. A special levy proposed with three months' notice is a very different conversation from one proposed in the same meeting as the quote.

The bands below are indicative South East Queensland metro figures for scoping and budgeting. They are not a quote, and they are wide because the drivers are wide. Long repetitive runs on one building move the linear metre rate toward the bottom of the band; a single short crack prices as a minimum job, not as a rate.

Where we will tell the committee not to inject

Injection seals a defined path through concrete. It is very good at that and useless at everything else, and a large share of the strata enquiries we take are not injection jobs. Saying so costs us the job in front of us and is the reason managers call us back.

In each of these cases we will put the recommendation in writing, name the trade or consultant who should be looking at it, and where the right answer sits outside injection we will hand it across to the wider S and S Remedial business or to an engineer rather than dressing it up as something we can seal.

• Blocked or absent drainage. Blocked agricultural drains, blocked weep holes, a planter outlet that no longer discharges, or surface water running toward the building. Clearing the drainage is sometimes the entire fix, and sealing the structure without restoring it raises the water head against a wall that may not have been designed for saturated backfill.
• A planter box membrane at the end of its life. Injection buys an interim result here, typically measured in months rather than years, and it is only honest if it is sold as that. A correct rebuild — strip the soil, replace the membrane to AS 4654.1 and AS 4654.2, reinstate the drainage cell and the outlet — runs one to three weeks. Sealing a planter without restoring its outlet turns it into a bathtub and loads the structure.
• Corrosion-driven cracking on a car park soffit. Cracking that follows the line of reinforcement, with rust staining, spalling or drummy areas, is steel expanding as it corrodes. Injecting seals the crack while the steel keeps expanding. That is a concrete repair scope, not a waterproofing one.
• Designed movement joints. Expansion and control joints are meant to move. Filling one with resin transfers the movement into the concrete beside it. The repair is joint preparation, correct backing rod and a movement-capable sealant.
• Water through the body of the slab or wall across a broad area rather than along a line. There is no crack to grip. The options are negative-side tanking, a drained cavity, curtain injection into the ground behind, or excavation — chosen on the specific circumstances.
• Anything with a lean, a bulge, step cracking, diagonal cracking or a floor level change. That is an engineer's assessment before any contractor prices anything, and we will stop and say so.
• Condensation misread as a leak. Damp on cold surfaces in still, poorly ventilated plant rooms and store rooms, with no correlation to rain, is very often condensation. The fix is ventilation and dehumidification, and injection achieves nothing except the cost of it.
• A leaking service. A weeping wall above a corroded main or a blocked stormwater line is a plumbing job. It is quick to rule out and expensive to get wrong.

How a common property job runs with us

1. Site inspection and defect noteHalf a day on site in most cases. Moisture readings at marked points, photographs of the water path rather than only the stain, and a check of the deck, planter or ground surface above. A quote-only visit is free. A full diagnostic — crack monitors installed and read, water or dye testing, GPR scanning, written recommendations — is charged at $450–$1,500 and is worth it on any building with a repair history.
2. Scope of works issued to the committeeQuantities counted and stated, unit rates shown, loadings separated from the base scope. Issued in a form you can send to two other contractors so the committee is comparing like with like. We do not require that we be one of the three.
3. Committee paper and meetingAsk us anything the committee needs answered before it votes and we will answer it in writing, so the response can go into the papers rather than being relayed second-hand.
4. Resident notification packDrafted by us, issued by the manager under the body corporate's letterhead. Levels and bay numbers, dates and hours, noise, vehicle movements, ventilation, and one contact name.
5. Staged worksTraffic management where required, vehicle and finish protection sheeted before any drilling, and only part of the area out of service at a time. Packers stay in the concrete for at least 24 hours before they are cut back and the holes plugged, so tidy-up is nearly always a return visit rather than the same day.
6. What you get at the endPhotographs before and after, taken from the same positions, a written description of what we found and what we did, and the observation period. If water reappears later, that record tells everyone within minutes whether it is the same path or a new one.

Licence, insurance and the compliance pack

S and S Remedial Services Pty Ltd holds QBCC licence 15438819. That number is a public record. Put it into the QBCC licence search and you can see the class, the status and any conditions on it without asking us for anything, and you should do that for every quote a committee receives rather than only ours. Displaying it is also a legal obligation in Queensland — the QBCC Act requires a licensee's name and licence number to appear in advertising, and a website is advertising.

Any trade work valued over $3,300 including labour, materials and GST requires the appropriate QBCC contractor licence. An unlicensed quote on common property is a risk the body corporate inherits, not the contractor, so licence verification belongs at the top of the assessment, not the bottom.

Certificates of currency for our insurances, our SWMS and the safety data sheets for anything used on site are available as a single compliance pack. Committees and managers are explicitly advised to verify licensing and insurance before approving common property works, so we would rather hand the pack over up front than be asked for it three days before a start date.

What it costs

Indicative only, and excluding GST. Build a line-by-line estimate for your own job with the price book, or read the working behind the rates in the 2026 cost guide.

Questions we actually get asked

A car park slab is leaking onto a lot owner's car. Is that the body corporate's repair or the owner's?

The slab and the soffit above the car spaces are almost always common property, so the repair to the structure is normally a body corporate matter even though the damage is showing inside somebody's lot. Damage to the vehicle or to the owner's fit-out is a separate question and is one for your body corporate manager and the relevant insurance policies, not for us. What we do is establish and document where water is actually entering, because in a car park with a topping slab the entry point is regularly several bays away from the drip, and the paperwork the committee relies on is only as good as that mapping.

Do we really need three quotes, and how do we make them comparable?

Three quotes is sensible practice and often required by the body corporate's own procedures for spending above a threshold, which your manager can confirm. The problem is that three injection quotes almost never describe the same work — one prices per crack, one per linear metre, one as a lump sum, and only one of them may include cutting the packers back and patching the holes. Issue a single scope of works with the quantities already counted and ask all three to price that document. Our scope of works guide has a template you can copy, free and with no form in front of it — use it on us as well as on everyone else.

Will this need a special levy, or can it come from the sinking fund?

That depends on your current budget and is a question for your body corporate manager, not a contractor. Broadly, recurrent operating costs sit against the administrative fund and capital or non-recurrent work like structural rectification sits against the sinking fund. The practical point is timing: get an indicative number in front of the committee at least one levy cycle before you need the money. A special levy proposed with three months' notice is a very different meeting from one proposed alongside the quote.

Do we need a Form 16 or a Form 43 for this work?

Possibly not, and the honest answer is that it is a determination for the building certifier rather than for us. Both are Queensland building certification forms used to record that a nominated aspect of building work was carried out and complies; Form 16 is generally used as an inspection or aspect certificate. Certification only arises where the work is the kind of assessable building work the framework covers, and a great deal of leak sealing on existing common property is maintenance and rectification with no form attached. If the committee wants certification, ask the certifier to confirm the requirement in writing before works start, because nobody can certify an aspect that nobody inspected.

How much of the car park has to close, and for how long?

We stage it so that only part of a level is out at a time. As a planning figure, a crew covers roughly 15 to 30 linear metres of joint per day in accessible conditions, and considerably less working at height off a scissor lift or under traffic management. Packers stay in the concrete for a minimum of 24 hours before they are cut back and the holes plugged, so any given bay is affected across two visits rather than one long one. If closing bays at all is impossible, night or weekend work is available at a labour loading of roughly 30 to 100 per cent, itemised so the committee can weigh the disruption saving against the cost.

One lot owner will not move their car or give us access. What happens?

Access is a body corporate and management issue rather than something a contractor can resolve, and it is the single most common cause of a lost day on strata sites. Practically: we need the affected bays confirmed in writing at least seven days out, the resident notice issued under the body corporate's letterhead rather than ours, and a nominated contact on site on the day. If a bay is still occupied when we arrive, we work around it where the sequence allows and return for that section, which usually means a second mobilisation charge. It is much cheaper to resolve in the notification stage.

Will you come to a committee meeting or the AGM?

Send the questions through and we will answer them in writing. Owners ask sharper questions than committees expect — why this resin, why not just seal the outside, why is traffic management its own line, what happens if we wait a year — and a written answer can go straight into the meeting papers where every owner sees the same thing.