Ask any trustee what takes up most of their evening and it won’t be the budget. It’s noise at 23:00, a dog in a pet-free scheme, a braai on a balcony, a visitor parked across someone’s bay. Small things — but they escalate fast, because almost every scheme handles them the same way: someone posts in the owners’ WhatsApp group, three people reply, and nothing is ever written down.
Six weeks later the same owner does the same thing, and nobody can prove it happened the first time.
What the prescribed rules actually require
Under the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act, conduct rules aren’t advisory. They bind owners, tenants and their visitors, and the body corporate has a duty to enforce them. But enforcement only works if you can demonstrate three things:
- The rule that was breached. Not “being a nuisance” — the specific numbered conduct rule, whether it’s a prescribed rule or one your scheme adopted and had registered.
- That the owner was notified. A complaint nobody was formally told about is not a complaint. It’s a rumour.
- A pattern, if you’re claiming one. Escalating to the Community Schemes Ombud Service or asking for a fine means showing this wasn’t a one-off.
None of that survives in a chat thread. All of it survives in a register.
Why complaints die
Three failure modes, in roughly the order they bite:
The complaint is never written down at all. The neighbour tells a trustee in the parking lot. The trustee means to email the managing agent. The week happens.
It’s written down somewhere nobody else can see. One trustee keeps a spreadsheet. Their term ends. The spreadsheet ends with them — and the new trustee starts a fresh one, from zero, with no history of any owner in the scheme.
There’s no evidence attached. “The bin was left out for four days” is an assertion. A photo with a timestamp is a fact. By the time anyone thinks to take a photo, the bin is back inside.
What a complaint record needs
Keep it short enough that it actually gets filled in, and complete enough to stand up later:
- Which unit — not “the flat with the red door”.
- Which rule — linked, not retyped from memory.
- When it happened, separate from when it was logged.
- Photos, taken on the spot, on the phone that’s already in your hand.
- A severity, so the managing agent knows the difference between a bin and a burst geyser.
- Everything that happened since — the email sent, the reply, the deadline given — on one thread, not scattered across four inboxes.
The last one matters more than people expect. Most disputes at the Ombud don’t turn on whether the breach occurred. They turn on whether the body corporate followed a fair, documented process before acting.
The handover test
Here’s the only test that matters for any scheme’s record-keeping. A trustee resigns tomorrow. Their replacement sits down on Monday morning.
Can they answer “has this unit been complained about before, and what did we do about it?” in under a minute, without phoning anyone?
If the answer is no, the scheme doesn’t have a complaints process. It has a group chat and some good intentions. The fix isn’t more meetings — it’s putting complaints somewhere shared, structured, and permanent, so the next trustee inherits the history instead of starting over.