Strata and body corporate pest control in Cairns.
If one unit in your block keeps getting treated and keeps getting cockroaches, the cockroaches are not in that unit. Here is how the common property boundary actually works, what it costs per lot, and where a committee’s termite exposure sits.
Who pays - the scheme or the owner?
It follows the common property boundary under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, and the practical rule is simple even though the arguments are not. The body corporate is responsible for pest management of common property - roof voids, external walls, grounds, basements, bin rooms, service ducts and the building structure itself, including termite management of the building. The lot owner is responsible for pest issues inside their own lot. Where it gets argued is a cockroach population living in a shared wall cavity or service riser and emerging into three separate lots. That is a common property harbourage producing a lot-level symptom, and treating the three kitchens without treating the riser is money burnt. Check your community management statement, because the boundary definition varies between schemes.
Our advice to committees is not to litigate that line. Adjudication over a $340 treatment costs more in management time than the treatment, and the scheme loses either way because the harbourage stays put. The pragmatic answer that works is a scheduled common property program funded from the administrative fund, with lot interiors offered on an opt-in day. The boundary question stops being interesting the moment the building is being treated as a building.
Why one-unit treatments fail.
Because the population is not in that unit. In an attached building, German cockroaches live in shared voids - the plumbing riser, the shared wall cavity, the ceiling space, the bin room - and disperse into lots from there. Treat one kitchen and you kill the individuals in one kitchen; the source reservoir is untouched and reoccupies within weeks. This is the single most common and most expensive pattern in Cairns strata, because the scheme ends up paying for the same unit four times a year and concluding that pest control does not work. It works fine. It was just aimed at the symptom. The fix is a building-wide treatment of the risers and voids on one coordinated date. More on the method at cockroach control in Cairns.
Treat the building, not the units.
You treat the building rather than the units, and access to lots is a bonus rather than the plan. The bulk of a strata program is common property work: external perimeter, roof voids, basements, bin rooms, service risers, plant rooms, grounds and the rubbish chute. That is where the harbourage is and it is where the population lives, and none of it needs a resident to be home. Lot interiors get offered on an opt-in schedule with notice - typically a nominated day where residents who want an internal treatment leave access, and those who do not, do not. In practice we get somewhere between forty and seventy per cent uptake, and the common property work carries the rest.
Two Cairns-specific notes on that. First, a great deal of the region’s attached stock is holiday letting and short-stay, which means occupancy is unpredictable and access is worse than in a residential block down south. Building-first is not a compromise here; it is the only design that works. Second, bin rooms and chutes in this climate are a category of their own - warm, wet, organic, and running twelve months a year with no winter to slow anything down. Half the cockroach pressure in a Cairns complex resolves at the bin room, and that is entirely common property. Worth checking the interval against the Cairns Regional Council collection day your scheme is on: a bin room in this climate that fills faster than it empties is not a pest problem the committee can spray its way out of, and an extra service or a second bin is often cheaper than the treatment it replaces.
Where the scheme has commercial tenancies on the ground floor - cafes, a restaurant, a convenience store - the interface between the tenancy’s own HACCP-aligned program and the scheme’s common property program needs to be deliberate, or you get two operators treating either side of a wall and neither owning the void between them. See commercial pest control.
The termite duty nobody put on the agenda.
The body corporate has a statutory duty to maintain common property in good condition, and in a high-hazard termite region like Cairns a committee that has never commissioned an AS 3660.2 inspection of the building is exposed. There is no clause that says the words ‘annual termite inspection’, but the maintenance duty plus a known regional hazard plus a foreseeable and preventable loss is the shape of every negligence argument ever made against a committee. Add that termite damage is excluded from the scheme’s insurance and it becomes a straightforward governance question: an inspection costs a few hundred dollars a building and structural repair costs tens of thousands that the scheme funds itself. Most Cairns committees we work with have it as a standing annual line item.
The insurance point is worth sitting with, because committees routinely assume the scheme’s building policy is the backstop. It is not. Strata building insurance carries the same termite, vermin and gradual deterioration exclusions as a domestic home policy. A Coptotermes or Mastotermes attack on a common property roof structure is funded from the sinking fund or a special levy, and a special levy for termite repairs is the sort of thing owners remember at the next AGM. The detail is on termite damage and insurance.
The other exposure is documentary. Where the scheme’s buildings were built with an AS 3660.1 system, the durable notice on each building carries an inspection due date, and the manufacturer and installer warranties are conditional on that schedule being kept. A committee that lets it lapse has not just risked termites - it has quietly discarded a contractual remedy that came with the building. See new build termite protection and AS 3660 inspections.
What it costs a scheme, per lot, per year.
Per-visit rates run $220 to $580 depending on the size of the common property scope, so a small eight-lot walk-up on a quarterly schedule is roughly $900 to $1,600 a year, and a forty-lot complex with basement parking, a bin room and a pool area on a quarterly schedule sits nearer $1,800 to $2,800 a year. Split across lots, that is somewhere between $40 and $115 per lot per year - a rounding error in most administrative fund budgets. Add the annual AS 3660.2 termite inspection of the common property structure at $235 to $380 per building. The number that matters is not the levy line; it is that reactive per-lot callouts cost the scheme more in one bad wet season than a year of scheduled work.
Put a real complex against it: a 24-lot three-storey block in Earlville, one bin room, a shared roof void across two buildings, a small pool surround, ground-floor cafe tenancy excluded from the scheme scope. Quarterly common property program at $460 a visit - external perimeter, both roof voids, bin room and chute, risers, plant room, grounds - is $1,840 a year. Annual AS 3660.2 inspection across both buildings at $620. Opt-in internal treatment day each October, billed to participating lots rather than the scheme. Total on the administrative fund: $2,460 a year, or about $103 per lot.
The reactive version of the same block: nine individual unit callouts across the wet at $290 to $340 each because the riser was never treated, about $2,800, an unresolved cockroach population, three owners writing to the committee, and no termite inspection at all. Same money, no result, and the termite exposure still sitting there. Bands on the pricing guide, and the seasonal timing on wet season pest control.
What committees and building managers ask us.
Can you attend a committee meeting or an AGM?
Yes, and it is usually worth it when a scheme is moving from reactive callouts to a scheduled program, because the resistance is almost always a misunderstanding of the common property boundary rather than the money. We will put the scope, the schedule and the per-lot number in writing beforehand so the committee is voting on a document rather than a conversation.
What notice do residents need before a treatment?
We work to the scheme’s by-laws and the manager’s standard, and in practice that is a written notice at least seven days out with the date, the areas being treated, the products being used, and the re-entry and pet instructions. Common property work in grounds and voids rarely troubles anyone. Opt-in internal days need the notice to be genuinely readable, which is where most schemes fall down - a photocopied A4 on a noticeboard is not notice.
Do you provide documentation for the scheme records?
Every visit gets a service report naming areas treated, products and active ingredients, quantities and observations, and it is written to be filed rather than skimmed. The annual termite report is a separate AS 3660.2 document. Between them, that is the paper trail a committee needs to demonstrate it discharged the maintenance duty, which is most of the point.
One owner refuses access. Does that wreck the program?
No, and it is why we design building-first. A refused lot is one lot; the risers, voids, bin room and perimeter are still treated and the reservoir still collapses. What a refused lot does mean is that particular unit will stay uncomfortable longer than its neighbours, which usually resolves itself by the second scheduled visit without anyone needing to invoke anything.
Service areas across the Cairns region.
Scheme quote for your committee, in writing.
Common property scope, schedule, per-lot cost and the annual AS 3660.2 termite line, set out so a committee can vote on it. Body corporate managers and building managers welcome. QLD Pest Management Technician licensed, QBCC-licensed termite management, AEPMA member.