Body corporate rules and disputes in New Zealand, your rights as an apartment owner

Last updated 4 July 2026. Tribunal fees and the reform status checked at that date. This is general information, not legal advice.

More than 15,000 unit title developments hold over 185,000 homes in New Zealand, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, and every one of those owners is in a compulsory financial relationship with their neighbours. When it sours, over levies, repairs that never happen, or a committee that treats questions as insubordination, the Unit Titles Act 2010 gives you more leverage than most owners realise. This guide covers the money, the repairs, and the dispute machinery, updated for the reforms that finished rolling out in 2024.

How a body corporate works

The reason the machinery matters is that when things go wrong, the machinery is your remedy. Every unit owner is automatically a member of the body corporate, no joining, no choice. The owners collectively make the big decisions at general meetings, one held annually, and usually elect a committee to run things day to day, with a chairperson. Voting power and money flow according to your ownership and utility interests, set when the development was created. A body corporate manager, if there is one, is a hired contractor, the decisions belong to the owners and the committee, never to the manager.

Body corporate levies and fees

Levies fund two different pots, and they are struck on two different bases. Everyday running costs, insurance, cleaning, the manager’s fee, come from the operating account, and your share follows your utility interest, which reflects your unit’s use of the services. Capital amounts, including the long-term maintenance fund, follow your ownership interest, which reflects your unit’s share of the development’s value. Special levies land when something big was not planned for, and they are lawful if properly resolved at a general meeting, painful or not.

Now the myth. Owners in a standoff with their body corporate often stop paying levies as leverage. It does not work. There is no right of set-off, meaning you cannot dock the levies you owe against money you say the body corporate owes you, and the unpaid levies plus reasonable collection costs are recoverable from you as a debt under section 124 of the Act, and the official dispute application does not even offer mediation for unpaid-levy disputes, they go straight to adjudication and Tribunal decisions consistently order payment. The move that works is the opposite one, pay under protest, in writing, and run your dispute separately through the process below. You keep the moral and legal high ground, and no debt with costs stacks up against your name.

Repairs and who pays

The line looks simple, the body corporate maintains common property, you maintain your unit. The Act then draws the interesting line, under section 138 the body corporate must also repair and maintain building elements and infrastructure that relate to or serve more than one unit, even where they sit inside or attached to an individual unit. Pipes, roofs, structural walls, cladding, and the waterproof membranes that keep the building dry generally land on the body corporate’s side, and where the work substantially benefits some units only, the cost can be recovered from those owners.

The grey zones have a leading case. In Wheeldon v Body Corporate 342525, the Court of Appeal in 2016 dealt with a Paihia apartment block where the deck membranes were failing. The decks belonged to individual owners, but the membranes drained the whole building, so the body corporate was entitled to do the weathertightness repairs across all of them, over the objection of owners who wanted to handle their own. The test is function, not location, if the element serves more than one unit, expect it to be a body corporate job, funded by everyone.

Your information rights

You are entitled to see where the money goes. Under section 206 of the Act the body corporate must provide copies of its records and documents on request, financial statements, minutes, contracts, correspondence about your unit, though it can charge a reasonable fee for copies.

Buyers get rights too, and since 9 May 2023 they have real teeth. The pre-contract disclosure statement a seller must provide now includes three years of financial statements and audit reports, recent meeting minutes, the fund balances, current levies, any known weathertightness problems or significant defects, remediated or not, and any pending legal proceedings. If you are buying into a unit title, that document, read carefully, is worth more than the marketing photos, and unittitles.govt.nz lists exactly what it must contain.

Fixing a dispute step by step

1. Put it to the committee in writing. Name the problem, the section of the Act or the rule you rely on, and what you want done. Many disputes end here because a paper trail changes behaviour.
2. Take it to a general meeting. Owners can requisition motions, and a committee that ignores one owner listens differently to a resolution.
3. Apply for mediation, $250. Tenancy Services runs mediation under the Tenancy Tribunal’s unit titles jurisdiction, and most disputes go first to a mediator who helps you settle it. Unpaid-levy disputes skip this step.
4. Adjudication, $500. If mediation fails or is unsuitable, a Tribunal hearing decides the dispute, with a $250 top-up if a mediated case moves on to hearing. The Tribunal can handle disputes up to $100,000, doubled from $50,000 in May 2023, and a successful applicant can ask to recover the filing fee.
5. The courts, for the big or excluded cases. Disputes over the Tribunal limit, and excluded matters such as questions of title, go to the District Court, which handles civil claims to $350,000, or the High Court above that.

One venue note, this is the Tenancy Tribunal wearing its unit titles hat, not the Disputes Tribunal. Our Disputes Tribunal guide covers a different door, and filing in the wrong one costs you weeks. The process and forms live at unittitles.govt.nz.

Challenging committee decisions

Majority rule has limits. If you voted against a resolution and its effect would be unjust or inequitable on the minority, section 210 of the Act lets you seek relief through the dispute process, with parallel protections around special resolutions and objection rights for the most consequential decisions. This is the tool for the genuinely unfair call, the special levy structured to hammer one unit, the rule change aimed at one owner’s circumstances.

The 2023 reforms also tightened who can sit on a committee and how conflicts are handled, members must not be in arrears, conflicts of interest must be declared, and an interests register kept. If a committee member is voting on their own contract, that register is where you start asking questions.

Body corporate managers

The manager drafts the agendas, holds the records, sends the levy notices and is often the only person owners ever deal with, which creates the illusion that the manager is in charge. Legally it is the reverse, the manager is a contractor engaged by the body corporate, answerable to the owners collectively, and replaceable by resolution like any supplier.

Since 9 May 2024, managers must comply with a code of conduct in the Unit Titles Regulations, honesty, competence, conflicts disclosure, and it gives owners a concrete standard to hold them to. There is no licensing or registration scheme, anyone can still call themselves a body corporate manager, so the code and the contract are your levers. One more wrinkle from the reforms, developments with ten or more units must engage a manager unless the owners opt out by special resolution, so self-management remains legal everywhere with the right vote.

The 2022 reforms are now in force

The Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2022 arrived in three waves, and as at July 2026 all of it is in force:

• December 2022, first technical provisions.
• May 2023, the strengthened disclosure regime for buyers, committee eligibility and conflict-of-interest rules, the $100,000 Tribunal threshold, and the manager requirement for large developments.
• May 2024, the manager code of conduct, regulator powers, and 30 year long-term maintenance plans for developments of ten or more units, costed in detail for the first ten years and at a high level for the remaining twenty, reviewed at least every three years.

If your body corporate is still running a pre-2023 playbook, a nine-year-old disclosure template or a ten-year maintenance plan in a forty-unit tower, it is not just behind, it is non-compliant, and saying so in writing tends to focus minds.

Common questions

Can I withhold my body corporate levies

You can, but you will lose. There is no right of set-off, the debt plus collection costs is recoverable from you, and unpaid-levy disputes go straight to adjudication where payment is consistently ordered. Pay under protest and dispute separately, the details are in the levies section above.

Can the body corporate make me pay a special levy

Yes, if it was properly resolved at a general meeting. Your protections are the vote itself, the section 210 relief if the burden falls unjustly on a minority, and the long-term maintenance plan rules that exist to make surprise levies rarer.

Who pays for leaky windows and decks

Usually the body corporate, if the element serves more than one unit, and the courts read that functionally. Deck membranes that drain the building and window systems that form part of the cladding are classic body corporate territory even though they are attached to individual units, with costs shared or recovered from benefited owners.

Can I see the body corporate accounts

Yes. Section 206 entitles you to copies of the body corporate’s records and documents on request, including financial statements and minutes, though a reasonable copying fee can apply.

How do I challenge a body corporate decision

Written objection to the committee, a motion at a general meeting, then the Tribunal pathway, mediation for $250 and adjudication for $500, with section 210 relief available where a resolution you voted against is unjust or inequitable to the minority. The step-by-step section has the details.

Do townhouses always have a body corporate

No. Only unit title properties sit under the Unit Titles Act. Cross-lease townhouses and fee-simple homes with a residents’ association run on different legal footings entirely, so check your title before assuming any of this applies.

Where to get free help

If your dispute is really with the neighbours rather than the body corporate, our neighbour disputes guide covers noise, boundaries and trees, and renters in unit title buildings should start with our tenant rights guide.

Are you in a body corporate battle, or have you fixed one? What worked, and what did the Tribunal make of it? Share your experience in the comments.