PERTHBuying strata in WA: the 2020 reforms and your information rights
WA's 2020 strata reforms: the compulsory pre-contract disclosure that lets you evaluate a scheme's finances, SAT as the single dispute forum
If you are buying an apartment, villa or townhouse in Western Australia, the law changed in your favour in 2020, and it gives you information rights that most buyers do not know they have. Understanding them can be the difference between walking into a well-run scheme and inheriting someone else's expensive problem.
What changed in 2020
Comprehensive reforms to the Strata Titles Act 1985 took effect on 1 May 2020 — the biggest shake-up of WA strata law in decades. They were designed to make strata clearer and fairer, and several of the changes matter directly to a buyer rather than just to strata managers.
Your right to information before you sign
This is the big one. The reforms gave buyers stronger legal protection through compulsory disclosure: a seller must give a prospective buyer information about both the strata scheme and the individual lot before the contract of sale is signed. If the seller does not provide it, the buyer may be able to delay settlement or, in some circumstances, avoid the contract entirely.
The point of that disclosure is to let you evaluate the financial health and the functioning of the scheme before you are committed. It should help you see the levies, the state of the administrative and reserve funds, any known upcoming expenses, the scheme by-laws, and whether the scheme is being run cooperatively or is at war with itself. A scheme with a depleted reserve fund and a major repair coming is a very different buy from one with money set aside, and this disclosure is how you find out which you are looking at.
Disputes now have one door
The reforms made the State Administrative Tribunal the single forum for most strata disputes, replacing a confusing situation where a matter might have been heard in any of several courts. For an owner, that means a lower-cost, more predictable path if something goes wrong in the scheme — and it is the same tribunal that hears the building disputes covered on our disputes page.
The kinds of strata, and why it matters
Not all strata is apartments. WA strata schemes include built strata, survey-strata (where it is the land that is subdivided rather than the building), single-tier schemes, and since 2020, leasehold strata for fixed terms. What you are actually buying — and what is common property versus your lot — depends on the scheme type, which is one more reason the disclosure documents repay careful reading.
A five-year statutory review of the Act is currently underway, so this area continues to evolve; the 2020 framework is the current law.
Where an inspection fits
The legal disclosure tells you about the scheme's finances and governance. It does not tell you about the physical condition of what you are buying, and the two questions are separate. Under AS 4349.1, an apartment inspection is limited to your lot and its immediate surrounds — common property is outside its scope — but it tells you the condition of the residence you are actually purchasing, and flags where evidence points to a common-property problem the strata records should explain.
Read the disclosure and have the lot inspected. One tells you whether the scheme is solvent and functional; the other tells you whether the apartment is sound. A confident purchase needs both, and the things that most often cost apartment owners — a failing balcony membrane, concrete spalling, or combustible cladding — sit exactly where the two overlap.
The special levy is the risk that hides in the records
The financial danger that catches strata buyers hardest is not anything inside the apartment itself; it is the special levy, a one-off charge raised across all owners to fund a major common-property repair that the ordinary contributions cannot cover. Concrete remediation on an ageing building, a full re-waterproofing of a podium or a set of balconies, replacement of combustible cladding, a lift overhaul: these run to serious money, and they are shared among the owners according to unit entitlement, regardless of whether an owner bought twenty years ago or the week before the vote. A special levy passed the month before you settle becomes your bill the day you take the lot, and there is no undoing it once you own it. The vote is what counts, not the timing.
This is precisely why the strengthened information rights matter so much, and why reading the records is not optional diligence but the core of a strata purchase. A structurally sound apartment in a scheme that is about to hit every owner with a five-figure cladding or concrete levy is not a good buy, and the only place that liability is visible is in the minutes and the financial statements, not in the condition of the apartment. The 2020 reforms gave buyers a stronger right to that information for exactly this reason: the biggest risks in an apartment purchase are collective, and they live in the paperwork of the scheme rather than in the four walls of the lot.
How to read a scheme's financial health
Reading the records well means knowing what each document tells you. The financial statements reveal whether the administrative fund covers the day-to-day running of the scheme and, more importantly, whether the reserve fund is being built up to meet future major works or has been kept thin so that the next big repair will have to come from a special levy. A scheme with a healthy reserve fund has been planning; a scheme with almost nothing set aside is a scheme where the next major repair will land directly on the owners. The minutes of recent general and council meetings tell you what the scheme is actually arguing about: a defect being disputed, a repair being deferred because the money is not there, a levy being contemplated, a building problem that keeps recurring.
Where a scheme has a maintenance plan, it tells you what major works are anticipated and roughly when, which is some of the most valuable information a buyer can have because it turns future liabilities from surprises into known quantities. Read together, these documents answer the question that actually matters in a strata purchase, which is not simply whether the apartment is sound, but whether the apartment is sound in a scheme that is solvent, well managed, and free of a major bill about to fall due. A purchase made on the condition of the lot alone, without reading the health of the scheme around it, is a purchase made with eyes half shut.
The lot and the scheme are two separate assessments
The practical upshot for a buyer is that a strata purchase involves two distinct assessments that have to be done together, because neither is sufficient alone. The first is the physical condition of the lot itself, which an inspection assesses: the state of the apartment, its fixtures, its wet areas, the things within the boundary of what you are buying. The second is the health of the scheme, which the records reveal: its finances, its disputes, its anticipated major works, the collective liabilities that attach to your unit entitlement. A sound apartment in a troubled scheme and a tired apartment in a well-run scheme are very different propositions, and you cannot tell which you are looking at without doing both assessments.
An inspection of the lot tells you what you are buying inside your own front door. The strata records tell you what you are buying into beyond it. The building era, the type of construction, and the age of the scheme all point at where the risks are likely to concentrate, and matching that against what the records disclose is how a careful buyer avoids the apartment that looks fine but sits in a scheme heading for an expensive reckoning. The reforms made the information available. Using it is what turns the right into protection.
Common questions
What information must a seller give when I buy strata in WA?
Since the 2020 reforms, a seller must give a prospective buyer compulsory information about both the strata scheme and the lot before the contract is signed. If they don't, the buyer may be able to delay settlement or avoid the contract.
What changed in WA strata law in 2020?
Comprehensive reforms to the Strata Titles Act 1985 took effect on 1 May 2020, including stronger buyer disclosure, the State Administrative Tribunal as the single dispute forum, and new leasehold strata.
Does an inspection cover strata common property?
No. Under AS 4349.1 an apartment inspection is limited to your lot and its immediate surrounds; common property is outside its scope. The strata disclosure and records cover the scheme; the inspection covers the residence.
This comes up on every apartment & strata inspection and pre-purchase building inspection we carry out.
Read next: combustible cladding: is it on the building you're buying into? and balcony waterproofing: the membrane over your living room.
Sources
Read rather than recalled. Summarised here; the documents themselves are Crown copyright and are linked rather than reproduced.