The other side of the coin - Service on schemes

In our March issue, we dealt with service of legal process and documents served by the Owners Corporation. In this short article we deal with the other side of the coin, namely serving documents on an Owners Corporation. This too is codified – see Section 262 of the SSMA.

If you wish to serve summons and other legal process on an Owners Corporation you may do so by leaving it with:

·  the chairperson
·  the secretary
·  A member of the strata committee
· the strata managing agent

If you don’t wish to hand deliver legal process, service may be carried out by prepaid post addressed to the owners corporation to its address recorded in the folio of the Register comprising the common property. 

If you don’t know that address, and it is not provided to you voluntarily, you may discover that address by carrying out a Land Registry Services (LRS) information search. The common property title is usually delineated as CP/SP # (whatever the strata plan number is). This is public information and can be obtained online for a small fee. Use Dr Google to see how one does this. Such search entities as Infotrack can, on application, obtain a copy of the common property title provided one includes the common property title reference. 

For service of documents not summons or legal process, these may be served on the owners corporation in the same manner as above but in addition you may leave the documents in the letter box of the owners corporation (every owners corporation should have an on-site letter box). In addition, you may email the documents to the addresses specified by the chairperson, secretary or member of the strata committee. 

Unusually, the legislation does not specify emailing to the strata manager. From a practical view, emailing to a strata manager is the most common way of serving documents which are not summons or legal process.

We hope you find this information of assistance.

In April, we will concentrate our attention on why people seem to remember the negative more than the positive. Are you one of those people?