The Victorian Owners Corporations Act Review: What's in the Report Sitting With Government

What this guide covers

The Allan Government's expert panel finalised its review of the Owners Corporations Act 2006 (Vic) in late 2025. The report has been with Consumer Affairs Victoria since around December 2025.
Three months on, no draft bill has been tabled. The lead policy areas are reasonably clear from the consultation papers, public submissions, and the panel's terms of reference.
Five reform areas are most likely to surface in legislation: manager conduct and education, collective sale thresholds, short-stay accommodation rules, dispute resolution, and voting reform.
Mandatory minimum education requirements for owners corporation managers have already been signalled for April 2027 implementation.
Victoria is now the lagging eastern state on strata reform, and the contrast with NSW's staged 2025–2026 rollout is becoming politically uncomfortable.
What committees and owners should do during the holding pattern.

Victoria has roughly 85,000 owners corporations and 1.6 million people living in strata, which is approximately one in three Victorians. The Owners Corporations Act 2006 has not had a major update since 2021. The Allan Government commissioned a comprehensive review of the Act in 2025, with public consultation through Engage Victoria and a five-member expert panel led by former Minister Marsha Thomson. Submissions closed on 30 September 2025. The panel's report was delivered to the government in late 2025.

That is where the public timeline ends and the holding pattern begins. As of April 2026, no draft bill has been introduced, no public exposure draft has been released, and no firm commencement date has been announced for any of the panel's recommendations. The strata sector is operating with reasonable confidence that significant reform is coming, but with limited visibility on what exactly will land or when.

This post covers what is reasonably knowable from the panel's terms of reference, the public submissions, and the parallel reforms running alongside the Act review. It is not a leak; it is an assembly of the public record. Where the answer is genuinely uncertain, the post says so.

Why the review is happening

Three forces produced the review.

The Act has not kept pace with apartment growth. Victoria's apartment market has changed significantly since 2006. The Act was written when high-density living was a relatively small share of the housing market. By 2026, nine out of ten residents in the City of Melbourne local government area live in an owners corporation. The legislative framework was built for a smaller, simpler sector and is showing strain on issues including manager conduct, collective decision-making in larger schemes, and dispute resolution capacity.

Complaint volumes have risen. Consumer Affairs Victoria receives thousands of strata-related complaints each year, with persistent themes around hidden commissions, proxy vote manipulation, governance failures, and inadequate maintenance. The 2021 amendments tightened parts of the framework but did not address the underlying structural issues. The pattern of complaints has become familiar enough that it is treated as evidence of legislative inadequacy rather than individual misconduct.

Other states have moved. New South Wales has run a multi-stage reform program through 2025 and 2026 (the timeline is here). Queensland implemented BCCM amendments in 2024 and updated its Form 33 disclosure regime in August 2025. Western Australia is finalising its 10-year capital works plan transition. Victoria has been the standout exception, and the gap between Victorian protections and those available to owners in comparable jurisdictions is now uncomfortable to defend.

The terms of reference reflected those forces. The panel was asked to examine manager conduct, dispute resolution, voting procedures, short-stay accommodation, and collective sale thresholds, among other matters.

Reform area 1: Manager conduct and mandatory education

This is the most concrete area of the review, because parts of it are already happening.

The Victorian Government has been progressing minimum education requirements for owners corporation managers in parallel with the Act review. A Regulatory Impact Statement was issued in 2025; consultation closed in early 2026. The expected implementation date is April 2027. The framework is likely to require:

Initial qualifications before commencing as an OC manager.
Ongoing professional development to maintain registration.
A registration regime administered through Consumer Affairs Victoria.

This sits alongside a broader real estate professional registration scheme that was announced separately, requiring real estate agents, property managers, and OC managers to register and complete mandatory professional development from 2026–2027.

The Act review has consistently signalled support for raising professional standards across the sector. The Real Estate Institute of Victoria's submission, which is publicly available, recommended advanced education for managers, committees, and lot owners; mandatory minimum education requirements for OC managers; and a dedicated Owners Corporation Commissioner to provide regulatory oversight.

The Commissioner role is the open question. Some submissions favoured a dedicated body; others preferred strengthening Consumer Affairs Victoria's existing strata function. Either path is plausible in the eventual bill. A Commissioner-led model would be a significant institutional change and would put Victoria more in line with how some overseas jurisdictions structure strata oversight.

Manager conduct also covers commissions and conflicted remuneration. The panel's terms of reference included this; the NSW Productivity and Equality Commission's March 2026 final report on commissions sets a clear precedent for the policy direction. Victoria is unlikely to land somewhere materially less protective than NSW.

Reform area 2: Collective sale thresholds

This is the reform area with the largest potential consequence for individual owners. Victoria currently requires 100 per cent unanimous consent for a collective sale of a strata complex. This is the strictest threshold in Australia and effectively gives any single owner a veto over the sale of the whole building.

The 100 per cent threshold has both protected vulnerable owners (elderly residents, long-term occupants without the capital to relocate) and frustrated rational redevelopment of ageing stock. NSW operates a 75 per cent threshold (with a 80 per cent threshold for certain decisions and a Land and Environment Court fairness check). The panel was asked to consider whether Victoria should follow.

Submissions ran in both directions. Developer-aligned submissions pushed for a reduction to 75 per cent or lower. Resident-aligned submissions argued for protection of dissenting owners through dispute mechanisms rather than threshold changes. The most likely landing point is a NSW-style model: a reduced threshold (probably 75 per cent for sale, with consequential thresholds for related decisions) plus a tribunal or court fairness check that lets dissenting owners contest the terms of the sale.

This change, if it lands, will be the most consequential reform for owners in older Melbourne apartment blocks. The collective sales explainer covers how the existing process works and what an owner should and should not do when first approached by a developer. A separate Victoria-specific guide on what changes if the threshold drops is forthcoming.

Reform area 3: Short-stay accommodation

Victoria introduced its short-stay reforms in 2019, including the option for owners corporations to apply for orders against problem short-stay properties through VCAT. The 2024 short-stay levy (a state government 7.5 per cent levy on short-stay bookings) added a tax-side response.

The panel was asked to examine whether the 2019 reforms have been effective and whether further restrictions are warranted. Submissions identified two main weaknesses with the existing framework:

The VCAT application threshold is high. OCs must demonstrate a pattern of unreasonable behaviour by the short-stay operator, which is evidentially difficult and slow.

The framework is operator-focused rather than building-focused. OCs cannot simply ban short-stay use as a category through their rules; they can only respond to specific operators causing identifiable problems.

The likely direction of reform is to give OCs clearer powers to restrict short-stay use through their rules, similar to the WA registration scheme that commenced in January 2026 and the existing 180-day cap in NSW. The short-term rental crackdown post covers the cross-state picture in detail.

Whether the eventual Victorian reform allows outright bans (as some submissions sought) or only stronger conditional restrictions is open. Either way, the toolkit available to OCs is likely to expand.

Reform area 4: Dispute resolution

VCAT is the existing dispute resolution forum for owners corporations matters in Victoria. The system works adequately for individual disputes but has been criticised on several fronts:

Capacity. VCAT's caseload has grown faster than its resourcing. Wait times for OC matters have extended.

Cost barriers. Smaller disputes (rule breaches, levy arrears, individual conduct issues) are difficult to resolve through VCAT cost-effectively, leading to many disputes either escalating beyond their natural scale or being abandoned.

Limited owner-led pathways. The current framework relies on the OC initiating most enforcement actions. Individual owners have limited direct routes when the OC itself is the problem.

The panel's likely recommendations are some combination of:

Stronger VCAT powers for OC matters, including faster pathways for low-value disputes.
A dedicated OC Commissioner or strengthened Consumer Affairs Victoria function with conciliation and investigation powers, sitting between informal resolution and VCAT.
Owner-led dispute pathways that do not require OC action, including for disputes about the OC itself.

This is structurally similar to what NSW Fair Trading received in October 2025: stronger investigative and enforcement powers in relation to maintenance failures, plus extended limitation periods (NSW now allows six years, up from two, for damages claims against an OC for failing to maintain common property). Victoria is likely to adopt comparable mechanisms, though the institutional housing may differ.

Reform area 5: Voting and proxy reform

Proxy farming has been a documented issue in Victorian OCs, particularly larger schemes where developer-aligned or manager-aligned proxies have at various times distorted committee elections and major decisions. The 2021 amendments tightened proxy rules but did not eliminate the underlying dynamic.

Likely reforms in this area:

Restrictions on the proportion of total votes that can be held by a single proxy holder.
Stronger disclosure requirements for proxy collection.
Reforms to voting in smaller buildings to ensure quorum and decision-making remain workable when only a handful of owners are engaged.

This is the area where the panel had the most submissions and the least consensus. Owner-aligned and consumer advocate submissions wanted stricter limits; developer and manager submissions wanted to preserve operational flexibility. The eventual landing point will sit somewhere in the middle and is harder to predict than the other reform areas.

The proxy voting guide covers how proxy farming works in practice and what a committee can do under existing rules.

What's already been quietly delivered

A few reforms have been implemented adjacent to the Act review and are worth noting because they affect Victorian owners now, even though the main bill has not arrived.

The developer bond scheme. Modelled on the NSW Strata Building Bond and Inspection Scheme, the Victorian developer bond requires developers of multi-storey residential buildings (four storeys or more) to lodge a bond equal to 2 per cent of the contract price before an occupancy permit is issued. The bond is available to the OC to fund rectification of defects identified at 15–18 month and 21–24 month inspections. The exposure draft regulations were under consultation through to 30 January 2026. The scheme's expected commencement is between 1 July and 1 December 2026.

The Statutory Insurance Scheme for low-rise residential buildings. Same Act, separate stream. Applies to residential buildings under four storeys.

Building and Plumbing Commission rectification powers. The renamed BPC (formerly the Victorian Building Authority's relevant function) has expanded powers to direct rectification of defective work. Operational effectiveness has been criticised but the statutory framework is in place.

These are real protections for new buildings handed over after commencement. They do not address the governance issues affecting existing schemes. For that, the Act review report needs to translate into a bill.

Why the holding pattern

Three months without a draft bill is not unusual for a reform of this scope. Drafting takes time, particularly when the panel's recommendations cover multiple distinct policy areas (manager conduct, collective sales, dispute resolution, voting) that may have come from different sub-streams of the consultation.

The plausible explanations for the pace:

The bill is being drafted. Most likely. A bill of this scope will run to many hundreds of clauses and require careful drafting to integrate with the existing Act, the parallel education regulations, and the developer bond scheme. Six to nine months of drafting between report and exposure draft is normal.

Political prioritisation. The Allan Government has multiple housing-related reforms in train. Strata reform has to compete with rental reform, planning reform, and the broader building regulation rebuild for parliamentary time. Slippage is more about queue position than disagreement on substance.

Stakeholder management. The reform touches commercial interests across the strata management industry, the developer sector, the insurance market, and the legal profession. Some quiet consultation typically happens between the panel report and the exposure draft.

The frustration in the sector is real and visible. Lawyers writing for Docklands News and similar publications have publicly criticised the pace, arguing that the existing legislation continues to fail an estimated 1 million Victorians while the bill works its way through Consumer Affairs Victoria. That criticism is fair; it is also unlikely to materially accelerate the timeline.

What committees and owners should do now

The honest framing is that significant reform is coming, but no committee or owner should make decisions assuming any particular reform will land by any particular date. With that in mind, five things are worth doing during the holding pattern.

Review your manager's contract terms now. If your management agreement comes up for renewal in 2026, renegotiate with reform in mind. Ask for a fee-for-service breakdown alongside any commission-based proposal. Add a transition clause that commits to alignment with any new statutory standard. The how to read a strata management proposal guide applies in Victoria with terminology adjustments.

Document the OC's current rules and decision-making patterns. If voting reform is coming, having a clear record of who has held proxies, how decisions have been made, and where conflicts have surfaced will help when new rules apply. The OC Commissioner role, if it materialises, is likely to want this kind of documentation in any complaint.

Engage with the developer bond scheme if your building is new. OCs in new multi-storey residential buildings handed over after the bond scheme commences will have access to a defect rectification mechanism that did not exist before. Understanding the inspection windows (15–18 months and 21–24 months) and preparing to use them is now part of the first-AGM agenda for new builds.

Don't pre-empt collective sale conversations. If your OC is approached by a developer suggesting a collective sale, the existing 100 per cent threshold still applies until legislation changes it. An OC that signs early indicative agreements on the assumption a 75 per cent threshold will arrive shortly is taking a risk with timing it cannot control. Wait for the legislation.

Subscribe to Engage Victoria updates. When the exposure draft bill is released, public submissions will open. Committees that engage with the consultation will have an outsized influence on the final shape of the legislation, given how few of the 85,000 OCs actually do.

How Victoria's gap with NSW will close

The most useful framing for the next 18 months is that Victoria is closing a gap with NSW, not opening a new policy frontier. Most of what the panel is recommending exists in NSW law, in some form. The panel's job has been to assess whether Victoria should adopt the same direction, and the answer is broadly yes, with Victorian-specific adjustments.

That framing changes how committees should think about the holding pattern. The reform is not optional for Victoria in any meaningful sense; the political cost of leaving Victorian owners with materially less protection than NSW owners has become hard to justify. The question is timing and detail, not direction.

Committees that prepare assuming reforms similar to NSW's will arrive within 18 to 24 months are unlikely to be wrong about the substance. They may be wrong about the dates. That is a manageable error.

How UnitBuddy fits

UnitBuddy is built for committees, including in Victoria. The platform uses Victorian terminology (owners corporation, manager, rules, model rules) where relevant and supports the underlying mechanics regardless of jurisdiction. Reform in Victoria, when it arrives, will likely change the names of some forms and the thresholds of some decisions. The structure of the work (the records, the financials, the meetings, the maintenance, the disputes) does not change.

For Victorian committees specifically, the financial dashboard separates levies and special levies in the way the Victorian framework requires. The compliance tracker holds the OC manager contract renewal cycle, which is the most important date the committee has during the holding pattern. The records module preserves the documentation a committee will want if it needs to engage with any new dispute resolution forum, including the proposed Commissioner role.

This post will be updated when the exposure draft bill is released. Until then, the next 12 months by state guide covers what every Victorian committee should be tracking on a rolling basis.

Further reading: Self-Managed Strata in Australia covers what Victorian self-management actually involves under the current Act. The 2026 NSW Strata Reform Timeline covers the reform that Victoria is most likely to model. The Short-Term Rental Crackdown covers the parallel state-by-state movement on short-stay accommodation, including Victoria's existing position.