Capital Works Fund or Special Levy: Paying for a Repaint

There are broadly three ways an owners corporation pays for a repaint: out of accumulated funds, out of increased annual contributions, or through a special levy. Which one you are using changes the politics of the decision more than almost anything else.

This is general information about how these decisions tend to run. What your scheme can actually do is governed by its own rules and the relevant legislation, and it is a question for your strata manager or a lawyer rather than for your painter.

Paying from accumulated funds

The least contentious route, and the reason maintenance funds exist. Larger Victorian owners corporations are required to have a maintenance plan, and prescribed schemes must maintain a fund against it.

Where a scheme has been contributing steadily against a plan that anticipated the repaint, approval is usually straightforward — the money is already there for exactly this. The problem is that many schemes either have no plan, or have one that was written once and never reviewed against current pricing. A painting line set five years ago is likely to be well short.

Increasing annual contributions

If the work can wait a year or two, raising contributions to build the fund is easier to pass than a levy of the same total. Owners experience a modest ongoing increase rather than a single demand, and the increase persists into the next cycle, which leaves the building better placed next time.

This route only works if the building genuinely can wait, which is a condition question rather than a financial one.

Special levy

The route nobody enjoys. A one-off demand against every lot, usually with a payment deadline, frequently contested, and hardest on the owners least able to absorb it.

Special levies are sometimes unavoidable — a building with active water ingress cannot wait for the fund to build. But most special levies for painting are the consequence of a deferral decision made several years earlier.

How staging changes the picture

This is the part committees most often miss. A whole-building repaint may require a levy. The same work staged across three or four budget years may be fundable from contributions.

Staging costs more in total, because access and mobilisation are paid more than once — on a building requiring scaffold that premium is significant and should be quoted explicitly. But if the choice is a $140,000 levy this year against four annual programs of $42,000 funded from contributions, many committees will take the premium.

Staging also lets you spend where condition demands it. Elevations do not weather evenly, and repainting all four because they were last done together is habit rather than necessity.

What to ask for at quote stage

Ask any contractor to price both: the whole job in one program, and a staged version across three or four years with the mobilisation premium shown as its own line. Having both in front of the committee turns the funding question into a genuine choice instead of a fait accompli.

And whichever route you take, get the outcome into the maintenance plan afterwards. The single best predictor of whether a building faces a special levy next cycle is whether anyone wrote down what happened this one.