Perspectives on strata governance, technology and the way the industry operates.
7 August 2026
When a strata management agreement changes hands, the building's entire record set is often transferred on a USB stick posted between agents. Ten years of engineer's reports, remedial works scopes and builder correspondence arrive with no index and no reliable way to know what is missing. That matters most when a defect claim against the developer depends on documents nobody can find before the claim window closes.
19 June 2026
Businesses occupy a position on the technology adoption curve whether they choose one or not, and every position carries risk. Moving early is expensive and distracting; moving late risks being overtaken. In service markets the advantage of early adoption is not the technology itself but the ways of working that grow around it, which competitors cannot copy the way they copy features.
12 June 2026
When we pay for expert advice we are paying for trust in someone's judgement, not only for their knowledge. As AI systems enter professional services, the unresolved question is what happens when machine and human judgement disagree. Antlar's answer is a design commitment: a human stays in the loop on all decision-making, and technology is never used as a substitute for human judgement.
5 June 2026
Deferring a technology decision feels low risk because nothing visibly changes, but it is still a decision with consequences. The costs show up in three places: talented operators who leave rather than keep fighting outdated processes, security exposure from legacy systems past end of support, and the gradual failure to deliver the incremental service improvement clients expect year on year.
29 May 2026
As AI becomes more capable and widely adopted, the value of an institution and the value of the individuals inside it are separating. When that relationship frays, it becomes clear how much of someone's value was ever the person and how much was the role, the brand and the credential around them. The position that survives is neither refusing the tool nor holding the tool without the craft, but combining both.
22 May 2026
Frustration with a slow vendor is what usually prompts a strata management business to ask whether it should build its own software. Building is a different craft with different risks, and the questions that decide it are whether the build is feasible, whether the team will use it, whether it can be monetised, and whether it fits the business's existing systems. Partnership with someone who carries the development risk is usually the better answer than either building or staying with an incumbent vendor.
15 May 2026
A typical strata management software stack is a small number of mainstream systems surrounded by a large number of point solutions stitched together with workarounds. At the centre sits the trust accounting system, usually the oldest component in the stack, and because so much flows through it, it sets the ceiling for what the rest of the business can become. The result is not just inefficiency but fragility, since every workaround becomes another dependency that can break.
8 May 2026
Existing strata management systems make data hard to get out. An external-facing API is rarely available and PDF and CSV remain the standard export, which reflects underinvestment but also functions as a way of keeping users inside inefficient designs. Managers are judged on responsiveness and trust rather than on their software, but better systems create calmer workflows, attract sharper operators, and compound into reputation over time.
1 May 2026
From 10 December 2026, Australian Privacy Principle 1 requires an organisation to disclose in its privacy policy where a computer program uses personal information to make a decision that could significantly affect someone's rights or interests. Strata is unusually exposed to this, because scheme correspondence routinely carries health information, financial identifiers, dispute records and voting histories. Antlar's approach is to identify personal information and replace it with non-identifying placeholders before any content leaves Australian infrastructure, so third-party AI providers never receive names, contact details or financial identifiers at all.
10 April 2026
The cost of creating information has fallen to near zero, which makes verification a skill rather than an afterthought and makes trust the scarce commodity. In property, trust has always been the backbone of business development, so technology that removes or minimises it does not get adopted regardless of its capability. Antlar's position is to apply AI in strata without removing human decision-making and accountability, eroding privacy, or diminishing the role of professionals.
27 March 2026
Macquarie's 2026 strata industry benchmarking report found that 77% of businesses grew revenue in 2025 but only 59% grew profit, with median EBITDA falling from 23% in 2022 to 19% in 2025. Salaries now absorb 52% of revenue, up from 49% in 2022, while strata manager turnover sits at 24% against a national average of 15%. The one in five businesses classified as higher performers spend 44% of revenue on salaries rather than 60%, and retain 83% of their strata managers rather than 76%.