Extract NSW s184, VIC s151 & QLD Form 33 Strata Certificates

Pre-sale strata disclosure certificates are the spine of buyer-side due diligence on Australian strata, owners corporation, and body corporate property, and the form changes the moment you cross a state border. New South Wales issues a Section 184 certificate under the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015. Victoria issues a section 151 owners corporation certificate under the Owners Corporations Act 2006, delivered inside the section 32 vendor statement under the Sale of Land Act 1962. Queensland issues a Form 33 body corporate certificate under the Property Law Act 2023, in force from 1 August 2025; Specified Two-lot Schemes use Form 34, and schemes regulated under the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980 use BUGTA Form 18. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT, and the NT each have their own equivalents.

The certificate is not a document the buyer's conveyancer files and forgets. It is a structured financial disclosure — fund balances, contributions, insurance currency, pending levies, current legal proceedings, manager and committee particulars — that the buyer-side practitioner extracts data points out of and runs against the rest of the disclosure pack. The job to do is not "read the certificate"; it is to extract Australian strata disclosure certificate data into a working due-diligence record that holds up across exchange, refresh, and settlement. That is the lens this article takes from here on.

A note on currency before the per-state walks. A material chunk of the Queensland material currently sitting on conveyancing and strata-management websites still describes Form 13 as the live body corporate information certificate. Form 13 was replaced. The Property Law Act 2023 commenced on 1 August 2025 and introduced Form 33 for standard schemes, Form 34 for Specified Two-lot Schemes, and BUGTA Form 18 for the older Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980 framework. Any pre-2025 walkthrough is materially out of date; this article is written against current law.

The reader this is built for is the buyer-side practitioner: a conveyancer or property lawyer running pre-exchange due diligence on a strata, OC, or body corporate lot, a buyer's agent compiling a pre-purchase report, or a multi-property investor or their advisor acquiring more than one lot, sometimes across state lines. Where structured extraction at volume becomes the operational task, AI-powered strata document data extraction is the document-to-spreadsheet workflow the rest of the article describes in jurisdiction-specific shape.

New South Wales: the Section 184 certificate

Section 184 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 (NSW) authorises the owners corporation — almost always acting through the strata managing agent — to issue a certificate to any person with a proper interest in the lot, including a prospective purchaser. The statutory fee sits in the high-$50 mark, plus the agent's search fee, with turnaround that should comfortably fit inside a standard cooling-off window. A buyer's conveyancer typically requests it as soon as the buyer has gone unconditional on the property and well before cooling-off expiry.

The disclosures a Section 184 certificate must contain are prescribed. In practice the certificate sets out: current contributions for the lot, with amounts, due dates, and frequency, distinguishing administrative fund and capital works fund; unpaid contributions and accrued interest attributable to the lot; balances of the administrative and capital works funds at the issue date; insurance currency, including insurer, policy period, and sums insured; strata managing agent and strata committee particulars; by-laws made by the owners corporation that have not yet been registered with NSW Land Registry Services; minutes-of-meeting reference (so the buyer can request the underlying minutes); and particulars of any agreements the owners corporation has entered into. That last category is the catch-all that often carries the long-tail risk — the management agreement itself, embedded service contracts, and any commercial arrangements the scheme is bound by.

The buyer-side work is the extraction. The conveyancer is not just filing the certificate; they are pulling specific values into the diligence record:

• Current contributions per fund (administrative and capital works), captured separately, with frequency.
• Unpaid contributions on the lot and accrued interest.
• Administrative fund balance at the issue date.
• Capital works fund balance at the issue date.
• Insurer, policy expiry, and sums insured.
• Pending special levies, often disclosed indirectly as resolutions passed but not yet billed.
• Current legal proceedings, including respondent role and subject matter.
• By-laws affecting the lot's intended use.
• Strata managing agent contract length and termination provisions.

Each pulled value carries an interpretive question. Unpaid contributions become a settlement adjustment, not just a footnote. The capital works fund balance, read against the scheme's 10-year capital works forecast, tells the buyer whether special levies are likely; an underfunded scheme with a major works programme ahead is one who should expect a special levy inside their holding period. Sums insured set against current replacement-cost benchmarks expose underinsurance from policies that were never properly indexed. Pending defects litigation, particularly for buildings caught in post-Lacrosse-style cladding or waterproofing claims, transfers as financial exposure with the scheme rather than the seller. And the buried risk on a certificate that otherwise looks clean is almost always the special levy resolved at the last AGM but not yet billed — extracted from the certificate, budgeted for by the buyer.

The Section 184 certificate sits alongside, not inside, the formal NSW vendor disclosure pack. Section 11 of the Conveyancing (Sale of Land) Regulation 2017 prescribes the documents the contract for sale must attach; the Section 184 certificate is not strictly inside that statutory schedule, but it is universally requested by buyer's conveyancers, and the contribution figures on the certificate feed directly into the contributions context the buyer would otherwise piece together by extracting NSW strata levy notices into a working spreadsheet across the prior 12 months.

Victoria: the section 151 OC certificate inside the s32 vendor statement

The Victorian s151 certificate rarely arrives as a standalone document. Section 32 of the Sale of Land Act 1962 (VIC) requires the vendor to give the buyer a vendor statement — universally referred to as the s32 — before the contract is signed. Where the lot is in an owners corporation, the s32 must include a section 151 owners corporation certificate issued under the Owners Corporations Act 2006. The s151 is the strata-component input to a wider statutory pack that also covers planning, title, building permits, services, and outgoings. The buyer's conveyancer does not order it directly from the OC manager the way a NSW colleague orders a Section 184; they extract it from the s32 the vendor's representative supplies and read it against the rest.

The disclosures the s151 must contain are prescribed by the OC Act and run to a familiar list: current annual fees levied on the lot; unpaid fees and interest; lot liability and lot entitlement (the percentages on which fees and votes are apportioned); owners corporation committee details; OC manager details, including the term of any management contract; insurance currency; the rules of the owners corporation; the contracts the OC is bound by, including management and any embedded service or maintenance agreements; repair works planned or in progress; and current legal proceedings affecting the OC.

The buyer-side extraction tracks the same shape as the NSW walk, with Victorian field names. The conveyancer pulls out:

• Current annual fees and the apportionment basis (lot liability and lot entitlement).
• Unpaid fees and interest on the lot.
• OC manager and committee particulars, including the OC manager's contract term and termination provisions.
• Insurer, policy expiry, and sums insured.
• Pending special levies and approved repair works.
• Current legal proceedings, with role and subject.
• The OC's contractual commitments, particularly any long-tail service agreements.

Three red flags concentrate around Victorian specifics. Lot liability disproportionate to the lot's footprint or use is the first — the apportionment is set at registration and rarely revisited, so an over-apportioned lot pays disproportionately for the life of the holding. The gap between approved repair works and levied special fees is the second — major works recorded on the s151 as planned but not yet levied tell the buyer to expect the special fee inside their first year. The OC manager contract is the third — long unexpired terms and punishing termination clauses limit the buyer's downstream ability to change managers, and that constraint compounds in newer towers with active defects exposure.

The procedural shape matters too. Because the s151 is delivered inside the s32, errors and omissions in the s151 are errors and omissions in the s32. If the s32 statement is incomplete or materially inaccurate at the time the contract is signed, the buyer has rescission rights up to settlement under section 32K of the Sale of Land Act — the certificate's diligence weight is anchored by that exposure, and the buyer's conveyancer needs to read every disclosure on the s151 with that consequence in mind. A s151 that is stale because the vendor's pack was assembled months before exchange is not a procedural footnote; it is a basis for rescission if the staleness has produced material inaccuracy.

Queensland: Form 33 under the Property Law Act 2023 (and Form 34, BUGTA Form 18)

The Queensland regime is the one most likely to catch a cross-state conveyancer out, because it changed in mid-2025. Form 13 still surfaces in older online material and in muscle memory, but it is no longer the live document for any new sale — Form 33 is the standard-scheme certificate, Form 34 is the Specified Two-lot Schemes Module certificate, and BUGTA Form 18 covers schemes regulated under the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980.

The issuance timeframes anchor the operational shape of QLD pre-contract diligence. According to the Queensland Government's seller obligations for community titles schemes, in Queensland, the body corporate must give the seller a Form 33 body corporate certificate within 5 business days of request, with a 24-hour option available for an additional fee. That five-day standard, with the priority option, sets the rhythm a buyer's conveyancer should expect: a vendor preparing for exchange ordinarily has the certificate inside a working week, and a vendor scrambling against an imminent contract date has the 24-hour pathway.

The Form 33 disclosures are prescribed and broader than Form 13 was. The certificate sets out: the contribution schedule lot entitlement and the interest schedule lot entitlement (these set the lot's voting weight and contribution basis respectively, and they can differ); contributions levied on the lot, current and outstanding, which often need to be checked against the underlying QLD body corporate contribution notices; balances of the administrative fund and the sinking fund; insurance currency, including insurer, policy period, and sums insured; committee details; body corporate manager and caretaking service contractor details, with the relevant agreement terms; the by-laws; any agreements the body corporate is bound by; encroachments; and any planned improvements.

The buyer-side extraction in Queensland looks like the NSW and VIC walks with two extras worth highlighting. The conveyancer pulls out:

• Contribution schedule lot entitlement and interest schedule lot entitlement, captured separately.
• Current and outstanding contributions.
• Administrative fund and sinking fund balances at the issue date.
• Insurer, policy expiry, and sums insured.
• Committee composition and BC manager particulars, including manager contract term.
• Caretaking service contractor agreement details, including duration and termination clauses.
• Pending special contributions, recorded resolutions, and any current proceedings.

The two QLD-specific extras are the entitlement split and the caretaking agreement. Contribution schedule entitlement and interest schedule entitlement diverge in some schemes; a buyer who reads only one misjudges the lot's voting position relative to its contribution position. The caretaking service contractor agreement is the genuinely Queensland-distinctive risk: in larger residential and resort schemes, caretaking and letting agreements have historically been written for terms of 25 years and beyond, with restrictive termination provisions and management-rights structures that transfer as a structural cost into the buyer's holding period. A buyer of a lot in one of those schemes is, in effect, buying a co-owner share of a long-tail expense — the certificate is where that exposure is first surfaced for diligence.

Form 34 narrows the disclosure set for Specified Two-lot Schemes — typically duplex-style arrangements where the simpler scheme structure justifies a reduced certificate. BUGTA Form 18 covers schemes still operating under the Building Units and Group Titles Act 1980, mainly older developments that never transitioned across. A QLD-active conveyancer who confirms the scheme type before requesting the certificate avoids the wrong-form problem at the front of the work.

The per-lot field set for multi-lot and multi-state portfolio purchases

Three certificates, three vocabularies, and one buyer who needs the comparison on a single screen. A single-lot purchase produces one certificate, read once, recorded on a one-page diligence sheet, and filed with the matter. A six-lot block buy in a single Sydney scheme produces six lot-specific Section 184 certificates from the same owners corporation — same insurer line, same fund balances, but six different contribution amounts and six different unpaid-contribution lines. A national investor acquiring across state lines produces a mix: a Section 184 here, a s151 inside a s32 vendor statement there, a Form 33 in Brisbane, possibly a WA Form 28 disclosure or a SA strata Section 7 information form in the same portfolio. Reading each certificate serially in its own envelope buries the comparison the buyer actually needs, because the comparison is the point — which lot has the underfunded sinking fund, which scheme has the pending special levy, which one has the caretaking exposure that turns the headline yield into a long-tail cost.

The structured answer is a per-lot field set that holds every certificate's extracts in one record, with one row per lot and one column per data point. The shape that has earned its place across multi-lot work looks like this:

• LotNumber
• PlanNumber
• Scheme
• State
• CertificateForm (Section 184, s151, Form 33, Form 34, BUGTA Form 18, Form 28, etc.)
• IssueDate
• CurrentContribAdmin
• CurrentContribCapital
• UnpaidContributions
• AdminFundBalance
• CapitalFundBalance
• InsuranceInsurer
• InsurancePolicy
• InsuranceExpiry
• SumsInsured
• PendingSpecialLevies
• PendingLitigation
• ManagingAgent
• CommitteeChair

Each cluster carries its own diligence question. Fund balances belong next to the relevant 10-year forecast for the same scheme — the absolute number means little; the trajectory against forecast means everything. Insurance specifics belong next to the current replacement-cost benchmark for the building footprint, captured at the IssueDate so an underinsurance flag is anchored to a date. Pending litigation and pending special levies are the two columns that most often carry the inherited exposure into the buyer's holding period, and reading them across a portfolio surfaces concentrated risk faster than reading them lot by lot. Managing agent, OC manager, or BC manager contract terms tell the buyer what flexibility the new ownership will have to change suppliers post-settlement; in a portfolio acquisition where the investor wants to consolidate management onto one provider, that column is where the strategy meets reality.

The cross-state field harmonisation has to be explicit, because the same concept carries different names. The NSW capital works fund, the QLD sinking fund, and the Victorian maintenance plan fund (held by OCs that have a maintenance plan) are conceptually parallel long-cycle reserves for major repair and replacement, and the consolidated record uses one CapitalFundBalance column for all three rather than three separate columns that don't reconcile. Lot liability and lot entitlement (VIC) maps cleanly to contribution schedule lot entitlement (QLD) and the unit entitlement concept (NSW) — capture them under one ContributionEntitlement and one VotingEntitlement pair where they diverge, and as a single Entitlement column where they don't. Naming the parallel up front is the work that turns a multi-tab spreadsheet into a single-row record, which is what the buyer's adviser actually wants on the screen during the unconditional decision.

The threshold at which this shape earns its place is honest. A single lot doesn't need it; the certificate is short, the read is once, and a page of notes does the job. The shape becomes worth setting up at the threshold where comparison across rows starts driving decisions — a block buy in a single scheme, a multi-state investor portfolio, or a buyer's agent compiling a comparative pre-purchase report across several candidate lots. The same harmonisation discipline that turns a row of certificates into a working comparison applies to other cross-jurisdictional buyer-side records — for instance, US closing-side practitioners working with ALTA settlement statement extraction in the United States face the same field-shape problem when a portfolio crosses US state lines. The Australian strata version is the same pattern in the Australian regime.

WA, SA, TAS, ACT, and NT: the remaining state forms

The three majors carry most of the strata stock by transaction volume, but the smaller jurisdictions matter the moment a portfolio crosses a state line. The point of this section is the live statute, the live form name, and the practitioner reality — enough to confirm the document in front of you is the right one and to know roughly what disclosures sit inside it.

Western Australia. The Strata Titles Act 1985 (WA) governs disclosure for both survey-strata and building-strata schemes. The pre-sale disclosure pack runs under section 156, with the prescribed Form 28 carrying the scheme-specific particulars and related forms varying with scheme type. The convention worth flagging for cross-state practitioners is that conveyancing in WA is typically run by licensed settlement agents rather than by solicitors, so the buyer-side practitioner ordering and reviewing the disclosure may not be a lawyer at all. The diligence shape is the same; the seat in which it is done is different.

South Australia. Two documents both routinely called "Form 1" travel together in SA, and conflating them is the most common error a cross-state conveyancer makes on the first SA matter. The Form 1 under the Land and Business (Sale and Conveyancing) Act 1994 is the vendor's statement — the SA analogue of the Victorian s32. The Strata Titles Act 1988 (SA) Section 7 strata information form is a separate strata-corporation disclosure (sometimes also called "the Form 1" in market shorthand) that is provided alongside or as part of the vendor statement when the lot sits in a strata scheme. They are two distinct documents that travel together; one is the broader vendor pack, the other is the strata-component input. Treat them as a pair, not as one form.

Tasmania. The Strata Titles Act 1998 (TAS) sets the framework for body corporate disclosure on the sale of a strata lot, with the body corporate manager issuing the disclosure on request. Volumes are smaller and the practitioner network is concentrated, but the disclosure shape — fund balances, contributions, insurance, current proceedings, by-laws — runs parallel to the mainland regimes.

Australian Capital Territory. The Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011 (ACT) governs disclosure for unit title schemes, with the section 119 information statement issued by the owners corporation on request. Canberra's apartment stock is concentrated in newer mid-rise developments, and the section 119 statement is the document that surfaces the scheme's financial and governance position for buyer-side diligence.

Northern Territory. Two regimes coexist in the NT depending on when and under which Act the scheme was registered: the Unit Title Schemes Act covers schemes registered under the newer regime, and the older Unit Titles Act continues to apply to schemes still registered under it. The practitioner needs to confirm which Act governs the scheme before requesting the disclosure, because the form, the issuer, and the prescribed content all differ across the two.

The takeaway for portfolio practitioners is that a consolidated record built around the three majors absorbs the smaller jurisdictions cleanly. The CertificateForm column carries the variant name (Form 28, SA Section 7 form, ACT section 119 statement, the relevant NT pathway), and the rest of the row populates from the prescribed disclosure of whichever Act governs. The shape does not need a new tab for each smaller jurisdiction; it needs a CertificateForm value and the same field set.

Red flags, cross-referencing, refresh discipline, and common buyer-side errors

A buyer-side practitioner who treats the certificate as the spine of due diligence — not the whole of it — gets to the same place every time. The discipline points below are what separate that practitioner from one who treats the certificate as a tick-box.

The certificate is the index to the disclosure, not the whole of it. Every red flag that the certificate raises should be confirmed or downgraded by the corroborating documents the buyer's conveyancer requests as a follow-up. The AGM and committee meeting minutes show what was discussed and what is pending — a special levy resolved at the last AGM appears on the certificate as a single line; the minutes give the rationale, the magnitude, and the timing. The most recent annual financial statements show fund movements over the year — a fund balance disclosed on the certificate against a year of declining contributions and rising remediation expenses is a different number than the same balance against a year of disciplined collection. Those expense lines come from the strata manager's own back-office plumbing for processing multi-scheme supplier invoices and allocating them across body corporate ledgers, and reading the certificate's expenditure side against that AP discipline is what tells the buyer whether the manager's bookkeeping is keeping pace with the scheme's actual spend. The 10-year capital works or sinking fund forecast tells the buyer whether the disclosed balance is on track, behind, or ahead. The same financial discipline that an agency runs on its own books — the kind of structured reconciliation described in Australian real estate trust account three-way reconciliation — is the model for the buyer-side cross-check against the OC's books.

Refresh discipline closes the gap between issue date and settlement. A certificate is a snapshot at the issue date; if exchange is delayed, contributions billed in the interim, new resolutions passed at an interim meeting, or insurance renewed between issue and settlement, the certificate's data is stale. The standard discipline is to order a refresh certificate close to settlement and run the deltas — what changed, what was billed, what was resolved. The refresh is not a redo and does not need to repeat the full extraction. It picks up the changes against the original record so the diligence sheet that goes into the settlement file is current as of completion, not as of unconditional exchange.

The common buyer-side errors are predictable enough to enumerate. Treating the certificate as the sole diligence document — relying on its summary view of fund balances and contributions without requesting the underlying minutes and financial statements. Reading only the headline contributions and missing the buried "pending special levy" disclosed as a passed resolution but not yet billed. Missing the time-bar to raise objections within the cooling-off window, which closes well before the conveyancer's instinct says the work is done. Failing to refresh close to settlement, particularly in markets with delayed completion. Failing to cross-check the certificate against the AGM minutes and financial statements, which is where most of the certificate's red flags get either confirmed or substantially downgraded. In Victoria specifically, missing the rescission rights window when the s32 statement (and its s151 component) is materially incomplete or inaccurate at signing — the rescission pathway under section 32K closes at settlement, and a buyer who discovers material inaccuracy two days after settlement has lost the remedy that was available two days before.

A reminder on role boundaries. Several of these red flags are not the buyer-side conveyancer's decision to make on the buyer's behalf. They are facts the conveyancer surfaces to the buyer, with the implications named, and the buyer decides whether to proceed, renegotiate, or withdraw within whatever cooling-off or rescission window applies. The certificate-extraction work is diligence and risk-flagging; it is not contract advice on whether to buy.

Choosing your extraction route: manual review, portfolio spreadsheet, or firm precedent database

There are three honest extraction routes for buyer-side strata certificate work, and the right one is a function of volume rather than of the document itself. Picking the wrong route either burns time tooling up for work that doesn't need it or — more commonly — buries a portfolio practice in unstructured one-off files.

Route one: single-lot manual review. A buyer's conveyancer handling one transaction reads the certificate end to end, records the key data points on a one-page diligence sheet alongside the rest of the disclosure pack, flags the items that need follow-up against minutes and financial statements, and files the matter. The manual route is the right route for the single lot. The certificate runs to a manageable length, the read happens once, and structured tooling is overkill — the diligence sheet does the job.

Route two: portfolio spreadsheet for multi-lot or multi-state buys. A six-lot block buy, a multi-state portfolio acquisition, or a buyer's agent compiling a comparative pre-purchase report across several candidate lots all hit the threshold where the per-lot field set laid out earlier in this article becomes the operational record. Each certificate gets pulled into one row of a working spreadsheet built around the harmonised columns — the same CapitalFundBalance column receives the NSW capital works balance, the QLD sinking fund balance, and the VIC maintenance plan fund balance, the same Entitlement columns absorb the cross-state vocabulary, and the comparison the buyer needs becomes the spreadsheet itself. The diligence question stops being "what does this certificate say" and starts being "which row is the outlier." The same portfolio-spreadsheet pattern applies to multi-state Australian land tax assessment extraction, where state notices need to land in one surcharge-review evidence pack.

Route three: firm-wide precedent database. A conveyancing firm processing hundreds of strata transactions a year accumulates extracted data into a precedent and outcomes database — the same column-aligned record across NSW, VIC, QLD, and the smaller jurisdictions, retained as a long-running record across matters. The database serves two functions: in-matter, it speeds the per-transaction extraction by carrying the firm's own field schema and prompt definitions, so the next certificate slots into a known shape rather than being read from scratch; across matters, it surfaces patterns — specific schemes with chronic sinking fund underfunding, specific managing agents with consistently late certificate issuance, specific by-law clusters that recur in particular developments — that the firm's senior practitioners can use to give better in-matter advice. UK conveyancing firms run a parallel firm-wide extraction discipline on their own document workflows; the operational shape of UK conveyancing disbursement invoice extraction is a useful comparator for what a firm precedent database looks like in practice.

The second and third routes share one operational bottleneck: extracting structured data points from a PDF certificate into the firm's row format, repeatedly, without retyping. A Section 184 PDF, a s151 inside a s32, and a Form 33 are all unstructured PDFs to a row schema built for them; the work is to take the document, read the prescribed fields, and emit a row. That is the job a prompt-based document extraction tool — pointed at the per-jurisdiction field set this article has laid out — is built for, with the per-form prompt saved once and reused across every matter the firm runs. The first route, the single-lot manual review, does not need any of this.

Pre-sale strata disclosure certificates are statutory financial-disclosure PDFs whose contents extract into a buyer-side record. Whether the record is a one-page diligence sheet, a portfolio spreadsheet, or a firm-wide precedent database is a function of how many certificates the practice handles and over how many matters, not of the document. The certificate is the same shape; the record around it scales with the work.