Strata and townhouse roof restoration in Pakenham
The roof is rarely the hard part on a strata job. The plan of subdivision, the levy split and getting a quote that can actually be tabled at a meeting are the hard parts. We do those properly.
Who pays, the owner or the owners corporation?
It depends entirely on your plan of subdivision, not on what feels fair. In Victoria the test is whether the roof sits on common property or inside the lot boundary. On most Pakenham townhouse developments the plan defines lots by internal surfaces, which puts the roof structure on common property and makes it the owners corporation's cost. But a lot of Cardinia dual-occupancy and small three-unit plans define lots to include the whole building, which makes each roof the individual owner's problem even though the units share a wall.
Read the plan of subdivision before the first meeting, because arguing the principle without it wastes a year. We have watched Pakenham blocks spend two AGMs debating who pays with nobody in the room having read the document that answers it. Your OC manager has a copy. If there is no manager, any lot owner can order the plan from Land Use Victoria for a few dollars.
The reason this comes up so hard right now is timing. The medium-density infill that went through Officer, Beaconsfield and the older Pakenham pockets in the 2000s used the same concrete tiles and the same rigid sand-and-cement bedding as the detached estates, and that bedding has a 15 to 20 year service life in the Cardinia climate. So the townhouse blocks are hitting the wall at the same moment the freestanding estates are. Same cause, same cohort, harder governance.
Can you restore just one roof in the block?
Technically yes, practically it is usually a mistake. On a terrace-style Pakenham block the roofs are one continuous structure with shared ridge lines and shared valleys, so restoring one unit means stopping the coat at an arbitrary line down the middle of a shared plane. It looks exactly as bad as it sounds and it leaves the neighbour's failed bedding feeding water toward your fresh work.
Where units are genuinely detached and only the driveway is common, single-unit work is fine. Where they are joined, get the whole block done in one mobilisation and the per-unit price drops 15 to 25 percent anyway. That discount is not a sales tactic, it is arithmetic: scaffold and edge protection get set once, the crew mobilises once, and the coating gets sprayed in continuous passes instead of masked off at a party wall.
The party-wall flashing is the specific technical reason we push back on single-unit scopes. Where two townhouse roofs meet at a shared wall there is a flashing detail that is only as good as the work on both sides of it. Renew your half and leave the neighbour's failed bedding and perished flashing in place, and you have bought a fresh coat over a live leak path. We will quote a single unit if the plan genuinely makes it your roof alone, but we will put that caveat in writing.
What we typically find on a Cardinia townhouse block
- Blown ridge bedding across every unit, not just the one that reported a leak. The warning signs are identical, they just get noticed at different times by different owners.
- Shared valleys carrying two roofs' worth of water with twenty years of leaf in them, which is where most townhouse leaks actually originate.
- Caps bedded but not mechanically fixed, despite Pakenham sitting at N2 to N3 under AS 4055.
- Box gutters between units that were sized to AS/NZS 3500.3 for the original catchment and have never been cleared since.
- One unit with a solar array installed at some point by someone, with no record of what condition the tiles were in first.
How an owners corporation approves the work
Ordinary repairs and maintenance to common property can be authorised by the committee or by ordinary resolution at a general meeting, and roof restoration on a failing roof is repairs and maintenance rather than an improvement. Where it gets procedural is money. If the cost exceeds the threshold set in your rules or the OC Act for large contracts, you may need at least two quotes, and an owners corporation with an annual budget over the prescribed threshold must maintain a maintenance plan and fund.
The practical path is: get the condition report, table it, resolve to obtain quotes, resolve to accept one. Two meetings, not five, if the report is good. The single biggest accelerator we can offer a Pakenham OC is a report that answers the questions a lot owner will ask before they ask them, with photographs, so the meeting is about the decision rather than about the evidence.
Owners corporations also have a positive duty to repair and maintain common property. That cuts both ways and it is worth knowing. An OC that has a photographed report saying the ridge bedding has failed, and defers the work for three years while a lot owner's ceiling gets wet, has a harder conversation ahead than one that acted. Our permits and compliance page covers the statutory side in more detail, including why like-for-like restoration needs no Cardinia Shire building permit.
Sequencing around residents
A six-unit block is six households, six work-from-home setups, six sets of school pickups and at least two shift workers. We publish a per-unit day plan before we start: which roof is being pressure washed on which day, when cars need to be off the driveway, and when the spray coats are going down so nobody hangs washing out under them. It is not complicated, but the strata jobs that go badly almost always go badly on communication, not on roofing.
Do you work with owners corporation managers?
Yes, and we quote in the format they need rather than the format that suits us. That means a written condition report with photographs referenced to unit numbers, an itemised scope broken out per lot so the levy split is defensible, a single fixed price for the whole mobilisation, our VBA registration and current public liability certificate of currency attached, and Certificates of Compliance for any roof plumbing over $750.
Most delays on strata roof jobs in Cardinia are not about the roof. They are about a quote that cannot be tabled at a meeting because it does not say enough. A one-line quote reading "roof restoration, 6 units, $27,000" is unusable to a manager, because the moment a lot owner asks why unit 4 pays the same as unit 1 when unit 1 has more roof, the manager has nothing to point at.
We also give managers the thing they usually cannot get: a defensible answer on whether it is a repoint or a full restoration. Our inspection runs a screwdriver test along every ridge and hip line and photographs the result cap by cap. That evidence is what turns a contested AGM item into a routine one. If the honest answer is that four units need re-bedding and repointing only and two need the full restoration, we will scope it that way and say so, even though the bigger number is easier to sell.
What it costs per unit
Less per square metre than a standalone house, because the access setup and the mobilisation are amortised across more roof. Standalone Pakenham homes run $40 to $75 per square metre in 2026. A joined townhouse block done in one go typically lands at $38 to $58 per square metre.
Worked example: a six-unit Pakenham block with roughly 95 square metres of roof per unit, 570 square metres total, at $48 per square metre comes to about $27,360 for the block, or roughly $4,560 per lot before any levy weighting by lot entitlement. Two-storey blocks add scaffold, usually $2,500 to $6,000 across the whole job rather than per unit.
Note the levy weighting point, because it is where the argument lands. Owners corporation levies are normally struck by lot entitlement, not by roof area, so the owner of the big corner unit and the owner of the small middle unit may pay the same share of a job that plainly involves different amounts of roof. That is the plan's design and it is not something a roofer can fix. What we can do is give you the per-lot square metres in writing so the OC can make that decision with the facts in front of it.
Gutter and downpipe replacement across a block runs $95 to $160 per lineal metre and is very often worth folding into the same mobilisation, since the access is already up and twenty-year-old gutters under mature Cardinia street trees rarely have much left in them. Timing matters too: see the seasonal windows, because a block is a multi-week job and it needs a stable coating window, which means getting the resolution passed by August for a spring start.
Strata roof work across Pakenham and the Cardinia Shire
Quick FAQ
Who pays, the owner or the owners corporation?
Whatever your plan of subdivision says. Read it before the first meeting, because arguing the principle without it wastes a year.
Can you restore just one roof in the block?
Only if the units are genuinely detached. On a joined block you would be stopping the coat mid-plane and leaving a live leak path next door.
How does an owners corporation approve the work?
Condition report, table it, resolve to get quotes, resolve to accept one. Restoration is repairs and maintenance, not an improvement.
Do you work with owners corporation managers?
Yes, in the format they need: photographs by unit number, per-lot scope, fixed block price, VBA registration and insurances attached.
What does it cost per unit?
$38 to $58 per square metre on a joined block. A six-unit block of 570 square metres at $48 is about $27,360, roughly $4,560 a lot.
Need a report your OC can actually vote on?
Photographed condition report referenced by unit number, itemised per-lot scope, fixed block price, insurances attached. Free, and ready to table.