As an offshoot of the Sectional Title Survival Manual, released in 1983 and currently in its sixth edition, Graham Paddock has released the Sectional Title Meetings Handbook, which is set to become an essential guide for anyone who requires a better understanding of how sectional title meetings must be handled. The handbook explains how sectional meetings must be called, conducted, and recorded. It also integrates the requirements of the Sectional Titles Act, 1986 (“the Act”), the prescribed management rules (“PMRs”) and the common law so as to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic.

The Sectional Title Meetings Handbook will prove to be especially useful to sectional title owners who are not trustees and, as a result, are not exposed to formal meetings in this context often enough to gain a working knowledge of how they should be controlled and managed. It is hoped that the explanations given, for example of how decisions are taken in meetings, will “demystify” these processes and make sectional title meeting management skills more widely available, thus improving the standards of governance in schemes.

For executives, members and service providers of home owners’ associations, Graham has released the Home Owners’ Association Survival Manual. This book is intended to help readers navigate the regulated home owners’ association environment that can be new and confusing to many. In almost all cases, the executives of a home owners’ association are volunteers and residents in the community they manage. They face the challenge of enforcing amongst their neighbours and friends the restrictions and agreements that bind the owners of properties in the home owners’ association.

The Companies Act 2008 has introduced fundamental changes in the requirements for those home owners’ associations that are established as non-profit companies. In this text, the provisions of this law relevant to the operation of HOAs are set out as simply as is possible. Apart from the provisions of that Act, each and every home owners’ association has ancillary governance documentation that is potentially quite different from any other. The HOA Survival Manual extracts and clearly explains all the provisions of the new Companies Act and the common law that apply to the management of home owners’ associations.

Graham Paddock has more than twenty-five years of experience in advising and training sectional title and home owners’ association lawyers, developers, managing agents, estate agents, trustees and owners. He acts as a coach for managing agents, trustees, directors and owners involved in sectional title, home owners’ association, share block and retirement schemes, through his online platform, Paddocks Club. Having been called upon to advise government in a consultative capacity on matters relating to sectional title and community schemes, it’s fitting that Graham was affectionately dubbed a “national treasure” by one of his past clients.