Body Corporate AGM

Last night we attended a 2.5 hour Body Corporate AGM for our building – our first ever Body Corporate meeting now that we’re grown up apartment owners. I found the whole thing rather daunting. It was the first time I’d seen a meeting run formally with motions and seconds and votes and ayes and shouts of ‘point of order Chairman’. We were trying to figure out if we were the youngest there as well – certainly felt like it as the people who spoke sounded so terribly knowledgeably on accounting and finances and Unit Titles Act and management agreements and insurance and caveats and rights of way. However as the meeting progressed it became clearer the drama of running our building with 3 bodies corporate for the 3 different uses of the building (being commercial car park, retail and residential).

So at times it was a very heated mix of passionate homeowners protecting their security and way of life, property developers just wanting to get on with it, lawyers (from Auckland) making firm stands on their rights and challenging previously set up management agreements and financial statements, an emotional Body Corporate Chairman who has put life and soul into running the building, a feisty property manager who referred to a mountain of documents and Acts and us sitting quietly at the back hoping not to be fingered as nominees to stand on the Body Corporate Committee. I was all keen to join up but after seeing what experience and determination you seem to have to have I felt altogether just too overwhelmed.