Short answer
An NSW owners corporation must keep proper records of the scheme — the strata roll, meeting notices and minutes, voting papers and proxies, financial records, correspondence, and key documents such as the by-laws and insurance. Most of these records must be retained for at least seven years. The strata roll is the exception: it must be kept for the whole time the scheme is running.
What must be kept
The records an owners corporation must keep include:
- The strata roll — the register of lots, owners and entitlements.
- Notices, agendas and minutes of general meetings and committee meetings.
- Voting papers, proxies and ballots.
- Financial records — receipts, invoices, bank statements, and the record of levies.
- Correspondence sent and received by the owners corporation and committee.
- Key documents — the by-laws, insurance policies, and contracts with agents or a building manager.
How long they must be kept
The general rule is that records must be kept for at least seven years. Two things sit outside that:
- The strata roll must be kept for the whole life of the scheme, not just seven years.
- Secret-ballot voting papers are kept for a shorter period — around 13 months — reflecting the window in which a result might be challenged.
New records must now generally be kept electronically. Because retention periods and the electronic-record rule have changed in recent updates to the NSW strata laws, confirm the current requirements against the Act and Fair Trading before setting a destruction date.
Handover and access
Records aren’t just kept — they must be available. Owners have a right to inspect the records for a fee, and when responsibility changes hands (for example, appointing or removing a strata managing agent) the records must be handed over intact. Losing or withholding records is a governance failure, not a filing inconvenience.
Keeping the whole record set in order
The hard part of record-keeping isn’t the rule — it’s doing it continuously, for years, without a manager. A system such as Straita keeps the roll, minutes, financial records, notices and key documents in order as they are created, retains them for the required periods, and produces certificates and inspection extracts straight from the same store — so a self-managed committee meets its record-keeping duty without a filing cabinet or a scramble at handover.
Primary sources
- Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW), Part 5 (s 177–183) — records to be kept, retention periods, and inspection.
- NSW Government — Record keeping requirements (Fair Trading) — the list of records and how long each must be kept.