Friction analysis
Why owner communication breaks down
Most management companies communicate reactively, answering questions instead of publishing the answers. Four patterns recur.
Balance enquiries pile up
Owners call or email to ask what they owe, when they last paid, or why the balance changed. Each enquiry needs someone to open the ledger and read it back, and the answer is out of date by the next payment.
Statements arrive late or thin
When statements go out late, contain errors or show a single lump sum, owners stop trusting them. A dispute has nowhere to land because there is no shared record both sides can point to.
Charges cannot be traced
If owners cannot see which allocation method was applied and what share they carry, they challenge every increase, however justified. The management committee then spends the AGM re-explaining arithmetic.
No way to check without asking
Owners abroad, or in a different time zone, have no way to see their position outside office hours. In Cyprus, where many apartments are owned by people living abroad, this is a common case rather than an exception.
Operating playbook
Five practices that remove the question
Each practice publishes one category of answer. Together they replace the enquiry with a page the owner can open.
- 01
Give owners a self-service portal
Publish each owner's own data where they can read it: current balances for the common fund and the reserve fund, payment history, the statement archive and the building's documents. Sign-in is by email; no app is needed. An owner with three units sees all three. The portal shows the same ledger the manager sees, so the answer to 'what do I owe?' is the same on both screens.
- 02
Send statements on a schedule, not on request
Generate statements at the close of every period and send them the moment they are final. Owners without a portal account receive a short email with a link to create one, so nobody is left waiting for a paper copy. In Cyprus the management committee keeps the building's accounts under Cap. 224 and presents them to the general meeting; a monthly statement means the AGM confirms figures owners have already seen.
- 03
Itemise every charge
Each statement line names the expense, the allocation method (ownership share, floor area, equal share, per floor), the owner's share and the resulting amount. A lift maintenance invoice of €195.00 allocated by share among ten units above ground appears as exactly that. An owner who can follow the line back to the invoice has nothing to dispute except the invoice.
- 04
Show common and reserve balances separately
Put two sections on every statement: common expenses and reserve fund contributions. Owners can then see that the reserve is not being spent on cleaning and that a levy voted at the AGM is being collected as voted. The separation is enforced in the ledger, not applied at print time, so the portal, the statement and the clearance certificate always agree.
What the GDPR asks of a building
An owner register, a ledger of who paid what and an arrears list are personal data. Under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 the community of owners, acting through its committee or its manager, is typically the controller, and needs a lawful basis for each use: a legal obligation where the law requires the accounts to be kept, legitimate interests for running the building and chasing arrears, the contract for a managing agent's own services. None of this stops you publishing an owner's own data to that owner; Article 15 gives them the right to it.
What it does mean is that role scoping is not a nicety. An owner sees their own units, never a neighbour's balance; a former owner sees their own history, never the buyer's; the building's documents are visible to owners, the arrears list to the committee and the manager. Keep contact details current, record what you sent and when, and retain accounting records for the period national tax law requires, typically six to ten years, confirmed with your accountant.
A note on language
Statements go out in the company's configured locale, with dates and amounts formatted for the country: 12.09.2026 and €1,240.00 in Cyprus, 12.09.2026 and 1.240,00 € in Germany. The PDF fonts cover every official language of the countries Domera supports, including Greek and Cyrillic. Common expenses are κοινόχρηστα to a Cypriot owner and Hausgeld to a German one; use the word your owners use in the covering email.