As the New Year approaches, most people are busy setting resolutions about fitness, finances, or finally clearing out the garage. For strata managers in Australia, it’s also the ideal time to reset something far more important: how you manage your buildings.
With ageing assets, rising labour and material costs, and increasing scrutiny from insurers and regulators, 2026 is not the year to “hope for the best” when it comes to building upkeep. It’s the year to get serious about your strata maintenance plan and move from reactive firefighting to calm, proactive planning.
In this article, we’ll walk through a practical New Year action plan tailored for strata managers. You’ll see how to create a strata maintenance plan, what a useful strata maintenance plan template looks like, and what best practice strata maintenance planning means in everyday terms.
Resolution #1: Commit to a Proper Strata Maintenance Plan
The first resolution is simple: decide that every building you manage will have a clear, documented strata maintenance plan. If maintenance lives only in your head, in scattered emails, or scribbled notes, you’re working with risk rather than a plan.
At its core, a strata maintenance plan is a structured roadmap for looking after common property and shared services. It outlines what needs attention, how often, who is responsible, and how it will be funded. Instead of reacting to whatever breaks next, you’re deliberately steering the building’s upkeep over the short, medium, and long term.
A good plan helps you:
- Reduce emergency breakdowns and last-minute call-outs
- Protect the value and lifespan of the building
- Demonstrate compliance and care to insurers and regulators
Best practice strata maintenance planning isn’t about overcomplicating things. It’s about bringing clarity. Scope, timeframes, responsibilities and budget all come together in one place so you can manage confidently and communicate clearly.
Resolution #2: Start With a Thorough Building Audit
If you’re wondering how to create a strata maintenance plan, the first practical step is to understand the real condition of the building. Without that, everything else is guesswork.
Begin with a structured building audit. This doesn’t have to be intimidating or overly technical. Think of it as a health check for the property. Walk the building, look at past records, and talk to people who know the site well. You want a realistic picture of what’s working, what’s worn out, and what’s likely to cause trouble soon.
During your audit, pay particular attention to areas such as:
- Structural elements like roofs, façades, balconies and stairwells
- Essential services, including electrical, plumbing, pumps, HVAC and lifts
Layer in information from the last year or two: work orders, defect lists, inspection reports and any recurring complaints from residents. For complex or high-risk items, for example, fire systems or waterproofing, it may be worth bringing in specialists to provide more detailed reports.
This process doesn’t just tick a compliance box. It gives you the raw material you need to build a meaningful strata maintenance plan for 2026 and beyond.
Resolution #3: Turn Audit Findings Into a Prioritised Schedule
Once you’ve gathered your information, the next step is to convert it into action. This is where best practice strata maintenance planning really starts to take shape.
Begin by grouping tasks into broad categories. Some work will be reactive, dealing with leaks, breakdowns or damage. Some will be preventive, regular servicing and inspections designed to keep things running smoothly. And some will be planned capital works, bigger projects like repainting, roof replacement or major upgrades.
Within those categories, you then need to decide what genuinely matters most. Safety and compliance sit at the top of the list. Anything that can lead to injury, regulatory breaches or insurance issues should be prioritised. Next, look at tasks that protect asset value, such as waterproofing and painting, which can save a lot of money over the long term.
A simple way to frame your schedule is to think in time horizons:
- What must be addressed in the first half of 2026?
- What can be sensibly staged over 3–5 years?
By doing this, you turn a long, messy list of problems into a structured, prioritised maintenance schedule that feeds directly into your strata maintenance plan.
Resolution #4: Standardise With a Strata Maintenance Plan Template
Trying to reinvent the wheel for every building is exhausting. A better approach is to create or adopt a strata maintenance plan template that you can adapt across your portfolio.
A good template gives you a consistent structure to follow. It prompts you to capture the right information and makes it much easier for committees, owners and new staff to understand what you’re doing and why. It also helps you avoid the “blank page” problem whenever you start planning for a new scheme.
Your template should make space for key elements such as:
- Basic scheme details and key contacts
- An asset register listing major plant, equipment and building elements
- A maintenance schedule showing tasks, frequency and responsibility
- A simple compliance calendar with critical inspection and renewal dates
You can build this in a spreadsheet if you need to, but many strata managers are now using digital tools where the strata maintenance plan template sits inside the software. That means you can update it easily, link tasks directly to work orders, and report at the click of a button.
Once you have a solid template in place, how to create a strata maintenance plan for each new building becomes a repeatable, much faster process.
Resolution #5: Align the Plan With Your Budget
A maintenance plan that ignores the budget is little more than a wish list. To be useful, your plan and your finances have to speak to each other.
Start by mapping your scheduled tasks and capital works against available funds. Look at current balances, levy income and known cost pressures such as insurance and utilities. This doesn’t mean everything you’d like to do can be done immediately, but it does mean you can make informed decisions rather than lurching from crisis to crisis.
A well-structured strata maintenance plan helps you:
- Justify levy levels with clear evidence and reasoning
- Spread major projects over several years to ease cash flow
- Reduce the need for unpleasant surprise special levies
In 2026, with costs still under pressure, it’s sensible to include a buffer for increases in labour and materials. You might also stage larger projects so that they fit more comfortably within the scheme’s financial capacity. Owners are far more likely to accept higher contributions when they can see exactly what they’re paying for and how it protects the building.
This is one of the big strengths of best practice strata maintenance planning: it connects maintenance decisions with financial planning in a transparent, defensible way.
Resolution #6: Digitise and Automate Your Strata Maintenance
If your current “system” is a mix of emails, spreadsheets and memory, you’re carrying a lot of unnecessary risk. It’s frustrating for you and confusing for owners and contractors.
Modern strata maintenance management software helps turn your strata maintenance plan into a live, interactive tool rather than a static document. Instead of chasing information, you have a single source of truth showing what’s due, what’s underway, what’s completed and what it cost.
With the right platform, you can:
- Store your strata maintenance plan and asset details in one central place
- Raise and track work orders with clear status and history
Automated reminders for recurring tasks stop important items from slipping through the cracks. Attachments such as compliance certificates, quotes and photos can be stored against each job. Communication with contractors is easier to follow and audit. And when a committee asks, “What’s happening with maintenance?”, you can show them real-time information rather than digging through old emails.
Software like i4T Maintenance is purpose-built for this environment, bringing together planning, work order management, contractor engagement and reporting into one integrated platform.
Resolution #7: Communicate the Plan Clearly With Owners and Committees
Even the best plan will cause friction if people don’t understand it. Owners may push back on levies, question decisions, or feel out of the loop if maintenance seems ad-hoc or opaque.
That’s why communication needs to be part of your New Year approach. Sharing an overview of your strata maintenance plan builds confidence and reduces surprises. It doesn’t mean bombarding people with technical detail, but it does mean giving them a clear story about what you’re doing and why.
You might provide a short New Year update outlining the top maintenance priorities for 2026.
Then, as the year progresses, keep the conversation going. Brief notices before and after major works, simple progress summaries at committee meetings, and easy access to relevant documents go a long way towards building trust.
If you’re using digital tools, you can also take advantage of portals or dashboards to let committees see status and history without needing to call or email you for every detail. That level of transparency supports best practice strata maintenance planning and positions you as an organised, proactive manager rather than someone constantly reacting to complaints.
Resolution #8: Review and Refine Throughout 2026
A strata maintenance plan is not something you create once and shove in a drawer. Buildings change, costs move, regulations shift, and new issues emerge. Best practice strata maintenance planning treats the plan as a living document.
Set a cadence for reviewing your plan. Quarterly is a good rhythm for operational maintenance, with a deeper annual review for capital works and budgets. During those reviews, compare what you intended to do against what actually happened, and adjust accordingly.
A few simple metrics can guide your decisions:
- How many planned tasks were completed on time?
- How often did you need emergency call-outs, and what did they cost?
By tracking this kind of information, you can fine-tune your approach year after year. Over time, you should see reactive issues decline, emergency costs reduce, and owner confidence grow. That’s the real payoff of a thoughtful strata maintenance plan.
Make 2026 the Year You Get Ahead of Maintenance
2026 is a chance to draw a line in the sand and change the way maintenance is handled in your schemes. By committing to a proper strata maintenance plan, auditing your buildings, using a sensible strata maintenance plan template, aligning maintenance with budget, going digital and communicating clearly, you can move from constant stress to confident control.
Instead of dreading the next “urgent” call, you’ll know there’s a plan in place, and a system to support it.
If you’re ready to move beyond spreadsheets and scattered emails, i4T Maintenance – Strata Maintenance Management Software can help you bring your strata maintenance plan to life.
With i4T Maintenance, you can:
- Create, store and manage your strata maintenance details across all your buildings
- Automate work orders, approvals and recurring maintenance tasks
- Track contractor performance, costs and compliance in one place
- Provide clear, up-to-date maintenance information to committees and owners
Book a demo of i4T Maintenance today and turn your 2026 strata maintenance resolutions into a practical, trackable action plan.
FAQs
It’s a written plan that sets out what needs to be maintained in the building, how often, who does it and how it’s paid for. It keeps you organised and reduces surprises.
Waiting for things to break usually costs more and causes more stress. A strata maintenance plan helps prevent problems, supports compliance and makes budgeting easier.
Begin with a building audit, list your key assets, decide what needs regular servicing and what needs long-term upgrades, then map this into a schedule and budget.
At minimum: building details, an asset list, a maintenance schedule (tasks and frequency), key compliance dates and a simple cost estimate.
It means having a clear plan, linking it to your budget, reviewing it regularly and using real data from work orders and inspections to improve over time.
i4T Maintenance lets you store your strata maintenance plan, manage work orders, track contractors and compliance, and report to committees – all in one system.