Every scheme has a list of things that need fixing. Very few schemes have a list you could actually show someone.
The gutters on block C. The gate motor that sticks in the rain. The paint on the north-facing walls that the maintenance plan says is due next year. Ask three trustees for the current state of any one of them and you’ll get three answers, and at least one will start with “I think someone was getting a quote.”
That gap — between the work everyone knows about and the work anyone can account for — is where backlogs grow.
It’s not usually the money
The reflex explanation is underfunded reserves, and sometimes that’s true. But the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act has required a ten-year maintenance, repair and replacement plan since 2016, and plenty of schemes that fund theirs properly still run a backlog.
What actually happens is more mundane. A job is raised verbally. It’s assigned verbally. The contractor does 70% of it and goes quiet. Nobody is quite sure whose turn it is to follow up, so nobody does. Three months later it surfaces at an AGM as a complaint, and the scheme pays more to fix the same thing because the damage spread.
The money was there. The job just fell out of anyone’s field of view.
The four places jobs get lost
Between the resident and the trustee. Reported in passing, at the post boxes, on a Saturday. Never written down.
Between the trustee and the managing agent. Forwarded in an email chain with eleven replies above it, where the actual instruction is in the middle of paragraph three.
Between the managing agent and the contractor. A phone call. No scope in writing, so “fix the gutters” turns into a dispute about whether that included the downpipes.
Inside the job itself. Most real maintenance is multi-step — quote, approve, order parts, do the work, sign off. A job that’s genuinely 60% done looks identical, from the outside, to a job nobody has started. So it gets chased at the wrong times, or not at all.
That last one is the quiet killer. “In progress” is not a status. It’s an absence of information.
What a job needs to not get lost
- A written scope, created when the job is raised, not reconstructed afterwards.
- A named owner — a specific contractor, not “maintenance”.
- Visible steps, so partial progress is legible to someone who wasn’t on the phone call.
- Recurrence for the predictable work. Gutter clearing before the rainy season shouldn’t depend on somebody remembering.
- A blocked state that’s distinct from in-progress. A job waiting on a part and a job waiting on nobody look the same on most lists, and only one of them needs chasing.
- Photos on completion. Cheapest dispute-prevention available.
Give contractors a way to report in
The step most schemes skip: let the contractor update the job themselves.
The usual objection is data privacy — quite reasonably, you don’t want a plumber browsing the owners’ register. But that’s an argument for scoped access, not for no access. A contractor who can see only their own assigned jobs, tick off steps and upload a photo of the finished work removes the entire follow-up burden from the trustee. The status updates itself, because the person doing the work is the person reporting it.
Where to start
Don’t try to digitise the ten-year plan first. Start with the live backlog — every open job, however small, written down in one place with an owner and a next action. Most schemes find the list is shorter than the anxiety around it suggested, and that two or three items have quietly been done for months.
Then keep raising new jobs the same way. A backlog you can see is a backlog you can budget for.