The Strata Squeeze is Real

Here’s What Top Performers Are Doing!

Strata management businesses across Australia are growing their revenue and their portfolios, yet fewer than six in ten grew their profit in 2025. Net margins have declined by nearly half since 2005, and salary costs now absorb more than 52% of revenue on average, up from 29% two decades ago. Buildings are getting larger, owners are more demanding, and regulatory requirements are intensifying.

This is the strata squeeze: a structural erosion of margin hidden in plain sight by consistent topline growth. Businesses that respond by simply adding headcount to cover capacity are the ones falling furthest behind.

Where Does the Squeeze Start?

The strata sector is growing, and so is its complexity. Owner expectations are higher, compliance obligations are expanding, and the operational demands on strata managers, across communications, maintenance, financials, and reporting, have never been greater. The businesses feeling the squeeze most acutely are not the smallest or the slowest growing. They are the ones trying to scale without the systems to support it. Staff turnover for strata managers sits at 24%, well above the national employment average, and the cost of replacing a strata manager, through recruitment, onboarding, and the client relationship disruption that follows, is significant.

Around one in five strata businesses are genuinely outperforming their peers. They are not necessarily the largest. They grow their lots under management at more than double the industry average (12% versus 5%), spend a lower share of revenue on salaries (44% versus 60%), and retain more of their strata managers year on year.

What separates them is not headcount or geography. It is how deliberately they have built their operations and utilise their tech to its full potential. 

What the Top Performers are Actually Doing Differently

The average strata manager carries a portfolio that is growing in size and complexity. Alongside that, they manage a constant stream of administrative work that has little to do with client relationships: manual bank reconciliations, levy notice generation, arrears follow-up, certificate production, meeting preparation, compliance tracking, and supplier management. Each task individually seems manageable. Collectively, they consume the hours that should be spent on clients.

High-performing businesses have addressed this directly through their strata management software. Automated bank reconciliation through direct banking integration removes the daily manual process, reduces error risk, and ensures financial tasks do not stall when a key staff member is unavailable. Levy generation, arrears notices, and bulk invoice processing follow the same principle: tasks that previously took hours each week run without intervention.

Work order and maintenance management gives strata managers visibility across their portfolio. Logging and tracking maintenance requests, managing supplier compliance, and holding a works history by building means credentials do not lapse, and managers are not spending time chasing information that should be at their fingertips.

Reporting and owner communications round out the picture. Automated financial reporting gives committees and owners clear, timely visibility over their scheme without the preparation time. Built-in communications tools and centralised document management mean AGM notices, owner updates, and compliance documents are faster to produce and easier to track.

The cumulative effect is straightforward: strata managers spend more time on the work that retains clients, and the business can grow its portfolio without a proportional increase in headcount.

From Hours to Minutes with a Modern Strata Platform

When Melbourne-based Stratabase acquired a portfolio of 16 owners corporations in 2023, founders Richard Reid and Charlie Xu had no operational handover and a backlog of manual work to address. Having both used legacy systems in previous roles, they knew exactly how time-consuming routine tasks could be: budgeting alone could require downloading financials, populating spreadsheets, and re-importing data, consuming 30 minutes or more per property. Fee notices could take one to two days per quarter to produce.

With Urbanise Strata already in place at Stratabase, that wasn't their reality. Budgeting takes minutes. Fee notices run automatically. In two years, Richard and Charlie grew from 16 to 86 owners corporations and over 1,200 lots, with a team of two founders and one full-time equivalent in part-time support.

"Urbanise is incredibly intuitive. It's easy for a strata manager to come in and just use it, as it's clearly been built for strata managers." — Richard Reid, Stratabase

How will the Strata Industry Become Future Ready

The operational shifts already underway are only part of the picture. The businesses that will lead the industry over the next five years are the ones investing now in the capabilities that will define it.

The Role AI Will Play

According to the 2026 Macquarie Bank Strata Industry Benchmarking Report, AI is already present in 80% of strata businesses, mostly for drafting communications. That is a narrow use of a capability that goes much further. Applied across the data a strata business already holds, including financial records, levy histories, compliance documents, and maintenance schedules, AI can surface answers from live data, produce routine documents at scale, and flag issues before they become reactive problems. The opportunity is not to replace the strata manager. It is to remove the administrative weight that prevents them from focusing on clients.

Intuitive Features Creating Even More Efficiencies

Owner expectations are rising and team capacity is limited. Strata platforms will need to do more of the heavy lifting, empowering users to access information at their fingertips and streamlining communications, compliance, reporting, and day-to-day task management. This approach reduces friction and complexity for everyone involved.

Flexible and Beneficial Banking Integrations

Strata managers are gaining new options across banking, payments, and financial services, including end-to-end payment solutions tailored to the strata industry. Greater automation means managing vast numbers of scheme bank accounts becomes less of a burden, and clients benefit from payment options that are modern, reliable, and cost effective. It is an evolving space, and the businesses connected to the right ecosystem will be best placed to take advantage of it.

The Platform Decision Is a Business Decision

The margin gap between high-performing strata businesses and the rest is not closing. Businesses without the right infrastructure will continue absorbing revenue in salary costs, losing ground to competitors running leaner teams on better platforms, and finding growth harder to sustain as the market tightens. The difference is not effort. It is operational design.

Urbanise Strata is a cloud-based strata management platform, ISO 27001 certified, hosted in Australian AWS data center's, and integrated with leading banking, and voting platforms designed to scale with a strata business rather than become a constraint on it.

Ready to see what it can do for your business? Book a demo to talk through your specific portfolio with our team.

Industry performance data referenced in this article is sourced from the 2026 Macquarie Bank Strata Industry Benchmarking Report, based on findings from over 200 strata businesses managing a combined 1.4 million lots across Australia.