What is OurCommons?

By 2022 I had finally saved up a deposit to purchase my first apartment. After months of looking, I had consumed so many s184 certificates and strata reports that I'd lost count.

The good news (if you can call it that) was that I had become very familiar with strata pain points, paperwork and what often predicated a collapse in committee functioning or incoming special levies.

I'm a lawyer by trade (with past experience advising owners corporations), and my dad is a builder (who regularly does building inspections), so suffice to say: we were nightmare buyers at every property inspection.

Between the two of us, we knew what to look for. Existing owners, potential buyers and real estate professionals missed plenty of massive gaps in the paperwork, capital works plan, and levy schedules.

After settling on a property, as any new diligent owner would do; I volunteered at our first AGM to join the strata committee and help run the building and try and help long-standing members close out large fireproofing works to get our insurance premiums back down. My strata manager was keen for me to get involved.

Volunteering took 30 seconds. The time commitment took up dozens of weekends over the course of the year; a lot of that time felt wasted.

Problems began to surface within weeks of joining the committee: scheduling time, sticking to core agenda items within that time, securing a quorum and enough votes, delegation of tasks and more. Within months, record keeping gaps emerged, messages were being missed, and burnout across all roles was painfully apparent.

Everyone accepted these pain points as an unavoidable, unsolvable part of the process. I wasn't so sure.

After a discussion with our strata manager and building manager, it was clear they were not equipped with the right software to do their best work. They were locked into tools that were expensive, bloated with features they didn't need, riddled with bugs and crumbling under decades of technical debt.

Strata professionals, unit owners, committees and building managers: all of them were crying out for a unified software solution that actually helped their day-to-day needs.

With these pains impacting my own building, and press releases rolling out reaffirming that strata governance is a nationwide issue, I resolved to build something that could help.

With nothing available on the market for my own building; I started creating a meeting assistant, levy planner and capital works model... which grew into a full-service, market-leading strata platform.