2 out of 3
The main reason is that most strata council members, strata managers, and strata owners have never actually worked inside a strata building on a day-to-day, month-to-month, or year-to-year basis. Therefore, there is little motivation to make things better, because as far as they know, the job eventually gets done. Coincidentally, the people who do the work in the building rarely if ever have any direct contact with the strata council. The continual breakdowns in communication cause the same problems over and over again.
You only have to try just once to coordinate with a trades person who has never been inside the building, meet to get them access, describe where to go, and what needs to be done, to truly know how easily things can go wrong. This is mostly due to how information is passed through the chain – the strata manager has to give out your name and contact information, the trade receives instructions from his boss, who receives his instructions from the strata manager, who receives instructions from the strata council, who often don’t know what exactly the job entails in the first place. The amount of emails, phone calls, and hand holding required to get one small repair done would absolutely astonish you. Several people have to waste their precious time in the process.
A simple analogy of what often happens in strata would be if someone gave you a hammer, and a nail, said “here you go”, and then walked away. It may look like you’ve been given the tools, and the solution to the problem, but there’s some critical information missing, not the least of which would be where exactly you should hammer the nail! Putting the nail in the wrong place could be disastrous (like in the waterproof roof membrane). What happens when something goes wrong, you ask? The trade has to return to the office, without even getting the job done. This is because the job ended up being more than expected, and the strata manager only had approval from council for the smaller job. The whole process starts again. You have to be an extremely patient, understanding, and forgiving person to put up with it time and time again.