Belvue Apartments Crosslease 93132

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A "crosslease" is just a legal construct for the shared ownership of property. If you own one or more apartment(s) in our building, the "crosslease" is really just you, me and the other owners taken together and acting in unison in the management of our property. A "crosslease" is similar to a "body corporate", but not quite the same. It is an older construct from before the time when the Unit Titles Act was introduced. The Law Commission report Shared Ownership of Land explains the finer details between crossleases and body corporates, but for many practical purposes, they are similar. A very readable document produced by the (now dis-established) Auckland Regional Council called The Mysteries of Bodies Corporate. A guide to the rights and responsibilities of apartment ownership gives you a good overview of how this all works.

The number "93132" of our crosslease is a reference to the Deposited Plan of our building on the Land Registry. And the name "Belvue Apartments" was chosen a long time ago to give our building a snappier name than just "crosslease 93132". "Belvue" is an anglicised version of the French "Bellevue", meaning "nice view".

So, when talking about "our crosslease", it really means nothing else than all us owners acting together.

The basic idea for our crosslease is essentially very simple: we as individual apartment owners are all equals and acting on our own in matters affecting our own apartments. But for the tasks of maintaining the common areas of our property, we as individual owners are expected to come together and act in an unanimous way (in some matters a simple majority of owners is enough, i.e. 33 apartments), pay our equal share into a common cash box and get the job of the "commons" done. The basic rules are written down in a 6-page contract called "Memorandum of Lease" (or short: MoL). Each one of us has agreed to this contract at the time we bought our apartments. There is no central authority to "police" the contract. If one owner is acting against the contract, it becomes the role of any other owner who discovers the wrong-doing to contact the wrong-doer and ask him/her to correct his/her actions. Problem resolution should take its way from there (and may occasionally end up in Arbitration or even a court room).

So far for the basic idea. But if you look at the 6 pages of the Memorandum of Lease, you will discover that page 4 does not fit well between the other pages. Whereas the other pages are a self-contained standard form printed contract (written by the Auckland Law Society), page 4 contains typewritten additions specific for our building. This page 4

allows (but doesn't require) us to employ a building caretaker/manager,
allows (but doesn't require) us to utilise a property administration secretary,
allows (but doesn't require) us to appoint an Owners Committee to perform the tasks of the "commons", as specified in the MoL and
singles out the downstairs "office" from the remainder of the "common area" and allows us to use this apartment either for a caretaker/manager or alternatively to be rented out on commercial terms as an income source for our "commons".

Subject to these rules, all decision powers of our crosslease originate from the owners acting together, making decisions by circulating and agreeing on proposals by mail or at Annual General Meetings (AGMs).

When the AGM elects or appoints an "Owners Committee" and delegates its powers to decide on the day-to-day business matters of our crosslease, the Owners Committee is obliged to act in accordance with the rules set out in our MoL and any decisions or constraints imposed by the AGM (such as budgetary constraints).

Our building manager is an employee of "Belvue Apartments Crosslease 93132", i.e. we all collectively are the employer.

"Body Corporate Administration Ltd." (or short: BCA) is a service provider, contracted by us to perform various secretarial and administration services. BCA itself does not have decision powers over our affairs, they are just supposed to provide us with their knowledge, experience and work force to help us conduct our affairs.

Part 1 of my discussion paper is an attempt to give a more systematic overview of all our rights and responsibilities and how the individual pieces of the puzzle fit together.