Strata tree management on the Central Coast - who decides, who pays, who signs.

The trees are common property - and that settles most of it

Under the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW), the owners corporation must properly maintain and keep in a state of good and serviceable repair the common property. In a typical Central Coast scheme - a block of units at Long Jetty, a townhouse complex at Kincumber, a villa development at Bateau Bay - the gardens, lawns and trees are common property, even where a tree sits directly outside one lot owner’s window and drops every leaf onto their courtyard.

That means an individual lot owner cannot remove or prune a common-property tree on their own initiative, and a resident who gets a mate with a chainsaw in on a Saturday has altered common property without authority. We get those calls and we decline them. The exceptions are narrow and worth checking rather than assuming: a tree inside a courtyard that the strata plan actually shows as part of the lot, or an area covered by an exclusive-use by-law that expressly assigns maintenance to the lot owner. Read the plan before anyone touches anything, because the answer differs scheme by scheme and the by-laws are where the surprises live.

The flip side is the exposure. Because the trees are the owners corporation’s responsibility, a documented complaint about a hazard that nobody acts on sits with the owners corporation, not with the resident who raised it. That is the risk a committee should actually be managing.

Committee authority versus a general meeting

For genuine emergency and maintenance work, the strata committee can generally act on common-property maintenance within the scheme’s approved budget and delegated authority. A limb hanging over the visitor car park at 7am after an East Coast Low does not wait for a meeting, and no strata manager we work with pretends otherwise. That is emergency and storm work and we treat it as such.

Where it gets harder is removing a healthy tree. Many schemes treat that as a change to common property rather than maintenance, which can require a general meeting resolution - particularly where the tree is a feature of the scheme, or where the owners are plainly going to disagree, which on a big shade tree they always do. Half the owners want the shade and half want the leaves gone.

The rule your strata manager will recognise: emergency make-safe now, maintenance pruning under delegated authority, removal of a healthy tree to the meeting. And get an arborist’s written assessment first in every case, because that document is what makes the decision defensible - to the owners at the meeting, to the insurer afterwards, and to the owner who did not get the outcome they wanted.

The permit collides with the meeting cycle

Central Coast Council’s tree and vegetation controls attach to the land, not the tenure. A strata scheme has exactly the same obligations as a freehold owner and precisely no shortcut. Trees above roughly 5m in height or 3m in canopy spread on private land are regulated, with the exemption schedule covering declared weed species such as camphor laurel, privet and willow, trees close to an approved dwelling for fire safety, and dead or clearly dangerous trees supported by an arborist’s assessment. Allow 10 to 28 days for the permit.

Now stack the timelines, because this is the part committees do not plan for. Resident complains in week one. Committee needs an assessment: week three. Removal of a healthy tree needs a general meeting: week eight if you are lucky with the calendar. Permit lodged after the resolution: week eight to twelve. Work booked: week twelve to fourteen. That is a three-month job from complaint to chipper, and every week of it the resident thinks nothing is happening.

The fix is sequencing. Get the assessment done first and lodge the permit in parallel with the meeting notice where the outcome is obvious. Better still, do not run this reactively at all - which is what a management plan is for. If the tree sits on the scheme’s boundary with a neighbouring property, our boundary and overhang guide covers that layer too.

Why a tree management plan pays for itself

A tree management plan is a documented inventory of every tree on the common property: species, size, condition, defects, the target underneath it, and a recommended action with a re-inspection date. It does three things a committee should care about.

Insist the schedule names the standard for every recommended action, because that is what makes it enforceable when you put it to contractors. Pruning should be specified to AS 4373 - thinning, reduction, lifting or selective work, cut at a branch collar - not “tidy up the gums”. A scheme that accepts the cheapest quote against a vague scope gets its trees topped, and topped trees in a strata block are a genuine liability: the epicormic regrowth is weakly attached, it fails in the next East Coast Low, and it fails over the visitor car park. Where the scheme has building or landscaping works planned near a retained tree, the protection requirements sit under AS 4970, and getting that into the contractor’s scope before the excavator arrives is far cheaper than replacing a 20m tree that was root-severed by a trench nobody supervised.

It converts unpredictable reactive spending into a budget line you can levy for. It gives the owners corporation a dated, documented record that it has been discharging its maintenance duty under the Act - which is the only thing that matters if a limb does eventually come down on a resident’s car and the insurer starts asking what the scheme knew. And it stops the loudest owner setting the tree agenda, because the work comes off a schedule rather than off whoever spoke longest at the AGM.

On the Central Coast the failure driver is specific: East Coast Lows and summer southerly busters, hitting saturated soil that has already reduced root-plate grip, on a canopy of spotted gum, angophora and blackbutt that holds serious mass 20m up. Coastal schemes at Terrigal, Avoca and The Entrance add salt-laden wind that prunes canopies asymmetrically and loads one side. A plan reviewed every two to three years, with a walk-around after any big blow, is the sensible cycle here. The warning signs are what your building manager should be walking the site with in the meantime.

2026 costs, and a worked example

Ex-GST. Documented tree inventory and management plan, small to mid-size scheme of 10 to 30 lots: $900 to $2,500 depending on tree count and site complexity. Scheduled maintenance pruning across a block, done in one visit: $250 to $700 per tree. Removal of a mature tree in a scheme: $1,600 to $4,500 - higher than an equivalent house block because access is across paving, over carports and around residents’ vehicles, and half the job is traffic management. Stump grinding: $180 to $600. After-hours storm make-safe: $600 to $1,600.

Worked example. An 18-lot block at Long Jetty, fourteen trees on common property, running reactively for years at roughly two callouts a year plus a storm event. Inventory and plan: $1,650. First scheduled visit, eleven trees pruned in one day at an average $410 each: $4,510. Two camphor laurels removed - exempt species, no permit, no meeting delay because the committee had the assessment: $3,400 the pair, stumps ground $620. Total first year $10,180, then roughly $4,500 every third year on the cycle. The scheme had been spending $3,000 to $5,000 a year reactively with no record, no plan, and an AGM argument every twelve months. Batching is where the money is in strata - one visit for twelve trees beats twelve visits, every single time.