Who cleans the outside of apartment windows?

The rule, and its one exception

In a NSW strata scheme, which by-law governs the glass depends on the scheme. The by-laws set for schemes in existence before the commencement of the Strata Schemes Management Act 1996 say: “An owner or occupier of a lot must keep clean all glass in windows and all doors on the boundary of the lot, including so much as is common property.” The regulation’s note adds that those by-laws also include any amendments to them and any additional by-laws made for the scheme, as in force before section 134 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 began, and that they may be amended under that Act. The model by-laws, which a scheme may adopt in whole or in part, split those surfaces: the owner or occupier takes the interior and exterior surfaces of the glass in the windows and doors on the boundary, and the owners corporation takes the exterior surfaces that the owner or occupier cannot access safely or at all. That exception is the whole of the colour code on the wall above: terracotta where the surfaces are yours to clean, blue-green where the corporation cleans them, and no ink where no public source can say which side a given window falls on.

The building code reads the same glass for a different purpose, and NSW’s window safety law puts two numbers on it: a window that can be opened whose lowest level is less than 1.7 metres above the internal floor it abuts, where that floor is 2 metres or more above the ground surface or other external surface below. A window on that description, in a building with residential lots, is one to which section 118 of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, on window safety devices, applies, if it is also a window as the Building Code of Australia means it and is either part of a residence or on common property that can be reached from one; the devices have their own guide, and guide 2 follows one window through both.

The same rule, in the Government’s plain words

The regulation is written for lawyers and strata committees; NSW Fair Trading’s pages set out the repair and maintenance rules beside it for everyone else, and the two are worth reading side by side. The state’s strata repairs page states the division in one line: the owners corporation carries the maintenance and repairs of common property, and each owner repairs anything in their own property. It repeats each half in turn: the duty to repair and maintain common property sits with the owners corporation or its strata committee, and the duty to repair and maintain what is inside a lot sits with its owner.

What the regulation adds is the exception, and what the pages add is the texture. The repair and maintenance rules cover all strata property, duplexes included. The corporation’s duty is to keep common property safe and working, and the laws it must obey and see obeyed include the ones on windows, pools and spas, fire safety and pesticides. The window law is one of the laws in that sentence, and guide 2 is where it is opened.

From NSW Government: strata repairs and maintenance and NSW Government: safety rules for strata common property.

Who decides that a window cannot be reached

No page this guide is written from states, for a given home, which upper windows can be reached safely; that is why the drawing gives the corporation’s ink to one window and leaves the rest of the upper wall uncoloured. What the sources do say is where the answer comes from. The by-law’s own words are the test: the owners corporation’s duty is to clean regularly the exterior glass that cannot be accessed by the owner or occupier safely or at all. Guide 3 works through what the ladder itself has to be, and guide 4 follows the work once it is a hired window cleaner’s, where the duties change hands and height.

The lock duties run the other way, and they are worth knowing before anything is installed. Window locks in a strata scheme are paid for by the owners corporation, from the administrative fund if the committee arranges it, unless the scheme’s by-laws say otherwise. A review of the locks, and any larger maintenance costs, can be scheduled through the scheme’s 10-year capital works plan. So the outside glass can be the owner’s to clean while the device on the same window is the corporation’s to pay for; the two duties do not move together.

Where this leaves the wall

Read back against the drawing, the model by-laws’ rule is short: the glass on the boundary is the lot’s to clean, and the part of it that cannot be reached safely or at all is the corporation’s. For a ground-floor window that settles the question early. For an upper one, the honest next step runs through the two tests no public page can take for a particular home: whether a ladder can be set up safely to reach it, which is guide 3’s ground, and what changes once a window cleaner is hired for it, which is guide 4’s.