Who Pays? Common Property vs Lot Owner Painting
Every strata repaint eventually produces the same question from at least one owner: why is the owners corporation painting that, and not this? It usually surfaces when scaffolding is already up, which is the worst possible time to be working it out.
The boundary between common property and lot property is what decides who pays. It is worth understanding before a repaint is scoped, because it determines what belongs in the contract and what does not.
The general principle
In a Victorian owners corporation, the plan of subdivision defines the lots. Everything on the plan that is not part of a lot is common property. The owners corporation is responsible for repairing and maintaining common property; the lot owner is responsible for their own lot.
That sounds clean. In practice, the plan is the document that matters, and plans differ. Two buildings on the same street can draw the boundary in different places. Anyone telling you what the rule is without having looked at your plan of subdivision is guessing.
What is usually common property
External walls and the building facade are almost always common property, including render, brickwork and cladding. So are the roof, the eaves and fascias, and the external face of the building generally.
Common areas inside the building follow the same logic: entry lobbies, corridors, stairwells, lift lobbies, shared laundries, plant rooms and basement carparks. Those are painted by the owners corporation as part of a scheduled repaint cycle.
Balcony ceilings and the external face of balcony balustrades are typically common property too, though balconies are one of the areas where plans vary most, and where disputes concentrate.
What is usually lot property
The internal surfaces of an apartment are the owner's responsibility. Interior walls, ceilings and internal doors within the lot are painted by the owner, when the owner chooses, in whatever colour the owner likes.
Where it gets less obvious is the transition points. An entry door to an apartment frequently has one face that is common property, meaning the corridor side, and one face that is lot property, meaning the inside. That is why corridor doors are painted uniformly during a common area repaint while the inside faces are left alone.
The genuinely contested areas
Balconies are the most common source of argument. The balcony floor surface, the underside of the balcony above, the balustrade and any glazing may fall differently depending on the plan. Some plans include the balcony within the lot; others treat it as common property with exclusive use rights granted to the lot owner. Those two produce opposite answers about who pays.
Windows and window frames are the next most contested. In many buildings the frames are common property even though they are only accessible from inside the apartment. That is why an owner cannot simply repaint their frames a different colour to the rest of the building, and why building-wide frame work is usually scheduled as part of the common repaint.
Exclusive use areas are a category of their own. An owner may have exclusive use of a courtyard, carpark or storage area while it remains common property. Whether maintenance sits with the owner or the owners corporation in those cases usually depends on the terms under which the exclusive use was granted.
Why this matters at quoting time
A repaint contract that has not resolved these boundaries produces problems in both directions. Work gets included that the owners corporation is not responsible for, and other owners quite reasonably object to funding it. Or work gets excluded that owners assumed was covered, and the complaints arrive after the scaffolding comes down.
The practical approach is to settle the scope against the plan of subdivision before quotes are sought, so every contractor is pricing the same thing. That is also what makes comparing three quotes meaningful, which we cover in our piece on comparing strata painting quotes.
It matters for funding too. Common property painting is generally funded from the maintenance fund or by levy, and how that is structured is worth deciding early rather than at the meeting where approval is sought. Our articles on capital works funding and getting a repaint approved at an AGM go into that.
Where owners can and cannot choose
Colour is the clearest example. On common property, colour is a decision for the owners corporation, made by resolution, not by individual owners. An owner who repaints their balcony ceiling or window frames in a colour of their own choosing has generally altered common property without authority, and may be asked to reinstate it.
Inside the lot, owners choose freely. Nobody at the owners corporation has any say over the colour of a bedroom.
Practical steps before a repaint
Get the plan of subdivision out and read it against the proposed scope. Identify the balconies, window frames and entry doors specifically, because those are where the boundary is least intuitive. Where the plan is genuinely ambiguous, get advice rather than assuming, because a wrong assumption becomes an expensive variation once access is set up.
Then put the scope in writing, circulate it before the meeting, and make sure owners understand what is included and what remains theirs. Most repaint disputes are not really about paint. They are about people finding out late.
The short version
Common property is defined by your plan of subdivision, not by where a surface happens to be. Facades, roofs, common areas and usually window frames sit with the owners corporation. Interior surfaces sit with the owner. Balconies and frames are where it gets contested, so resolve those specifically before quotes go out, and put the agreed scope in writing before anyone votes on it.