And What It Costs When They Do
By Dasun Premadasa — Founder, Merlo AI
It lands in the inbox at 8.47 on a Tuesday morning.
“Hi, can you please tell me what the current levy for Lot 14 is?”
The strata manager opens Outlook. Reads the email. Opens the management system. Searches for the plan. Finds Lot 14. Reads the levy schedule. Goes back to Outlook. Writes a reply. Sends it.
Four minutes, if they are efficient. Six or seven if they are in the middle of something else and have to context-switch back.
Now multiply that by the seventeen other emails sitting in the inbox that require the same thing. Levy balances. Document requests. Contact detail confirmations. “Has the inspection been booked?” “When is the AGM?” “What is the EV charging policy for the building?”
None of these emails required a strata manager to answer them. Every piece of information requested was already in the system, accessible, accurate, ready to be delivered. The only reason a qualified professional with industry expertise had to spend their morning answering them is that nobody had built a mechanism to answer them automatically.
That is the problem I want to talk about. Because it is not a small problem. And most strata businesses have never added up what it actually costs them.
The Two Categories of Email
I find it useful to think about strata inbox email in two distinct categories.
The first category is work that genuinely requires a strata manager. Dispute resolution. Complex compliance advice. Committee governance. Legal interpretation. Negotiating with contractors. Managing difficult owner dynamics. This is the work that requires professional expertise, industry knowledge, and human judgment. It is the work your manager was trained for and should be spending the majority of their time on.
The second category is work that requires information, not expertise. The owner needs to know their levy. The tenant needs to know the pet policy. The committee member needs a copy of the AGM minutes from two years ago. The new owner needs their bank details updated in the system. None of this requires a strata manager. All of it requires a system that can retrieve the information and respond accurately.
In a well-run strata business, a significant portion of all inbound email volume falls into the second category. The precise number varies by portfolio type, but in my experience across Australian strata operations, it sits between 30 and 50 percent.
That means one in three, or one in two, emails your manager is answering today could be handled without them. Not poorly. Not as a substandard experience for the owner. Better, in many respects, because the response would be immediate, accurate, and consistent — every time.
The Real Cost of the Answerable Email
Let me put some specific numbers on this, because I think the scale surprises people when they see it clearly.
A strata manager handling 80 plans receives somewhere between 80 and 120 emails per day. On a conservative assumption that 35 percent of those are routine information requests averaging 4 minutes each to open, retrieve, draft, and send:
35 emails per day x 4 minutes = 140 minutes per manager per day.
That is 2 hours and 20 minutes. Every working day. On emails that could be answered without them.
Per week: 11.7 hours.
Per month: 50 hours.
Per year: 607 hours per manager.
For a team of five strata managers, that is over 3,000 hours per year spent answering emails that a system could answer instead.
At a fully loaded cost of $65 per hour for a strata manager, that is $195,000 per year. Not in salary. In productive capacity being consumed by work that does not require the person consuming it.
That $195,000 does not appear in any budget. It is invisible because the work gets done — the emails get answered, the day moves forward — and nobody ever asks whether it should have been answered differently. The cost is real. It is just never measured.
What Those 3,000 Hours Could Buy Instead
I want to make the opportunity cost concrete, because the number becomes more meaningful when you know what you could be doing with it.
3,000 hours per year, recovered from routine email, is the equivalent of 1.5 full-time strata managers. Not headcount you would need to hire — capacity that is already employed in your business, currently deployed on work that does not require it.
If those 3,000 hours were redirected to work that actually benefits from a qualified strata manager’s attention, here is a sample of what becomes possible.
Each manager has 600 additional hours per year for complex scheme work — genuine compliance review, committee engagement, proactive scheme management, relationship development with key owners and developers.
Managers can handle a larger portfolio without proportionally increasing stress, because the volume of routine processing has been removed from their day.
New schemes can be onboarded more efficiently because the capacity to absorb them exists in the team without immediate headcount increases.
Owner satisfaction improves because the queries that do require a manager get faster, more thoughtful responses — and the routine queries get answered instantly, any time of day.
None of this requires hiring. It requires redirecting capacity that is already being paid for.
The Service Experience Problem
There is a dimension to this problem that goes beyond labour cost, and I think it matters more than most business owners initially recognise.
When a routine email sits in a strata manager’s inbox for three to six hours before being answered, that is a service failure — not because the manager is slow, but because the owner’s expectation has shifted. Owners today are accustomed to immediate responses from every other service they interact with. Their bank responds instantly. Their energy provider responds instantly. Their insurance company responds instantly.
The expectation that a routine enquiry — “what is my levy balance?” — should require a half-day wait because a professional has to retrieve information manually is an expectation that erodes trust in your service over time. Not dramatically. Gradually. It is a small friction that accumulates into dissatisfaction, and eventually into scheme loss.
The owners who are most vocal about slow response times are almost never complaining about complex queries. They are complaining about routine ones. They are complaining about waiting six hours to find out information that is sitting in a database, already accurate, that nobody gave them a mechanism to access directly.
When you automate routine email responses, you do not just recover labour time. You change the service experience entirely. Owners get answers in minutes. Any day. Any time. On the queries that require information, not expertise.
The effect on owner satisfaction is immediate and measurable. The effect on scheme retention is real, even if it takes time to appear in the data.
Why This Has Not Been Fixed Already
If the problem is this clear, and the solution exists, why has it not already been adopted across the industry?
I have had this conversation with enough strata business owners to know the common answers.
The first is concern about quality. “What if the AI gets it wrong?” This is a reasonable question. The answer is that a well-configured AI system, trained on your specific portfolio data and connected to your management system, achieves accuracy rates on routine queries that exceed what human processing typically delivers — because it does not have bad days, it does not context-switch between forty other tasks, and it does not approximate from memory. When the query is answerable from the data, the data determines the response.
The second is concern about the owner experience. “Will owners accept a non-human response?” This question reflects an assumption that has been comprehensively overturned in every other service industry. Owners do not want a human to tell them their levy balance. They want their levy balance. Speed and accuracy are the service standard for routine queries. How the response is generated is irrelevant to the owner.
The third is inertia. “This is how we have always done it.” This is the most honest answer and the hardest to address directly, because it is not a technical objection. It is a change management challenge. And it is real. Changing how your team works — even when the change is clearly beneficial — requires a decision and a commitment to hold that decision consistently.
The businesses that have made that decision are not looking back. The ones that are waiting are spending 607 hours per manager per year on emails they should not have to answer.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I want to give you a concrete picture of what the change actually looks like, because I think abstract descriptions of AI capabilities are less useful than specifics.
An owner emails asking for their levy balance. The email arrives at 7.42 pm on a Wednesday. Within three minutes, they receive a reply with their exact current levy balance, the due date for the next payment, and their bank details for direct debit.
No strata manager was involved. The system read the email, identified the query type, retrieved the relevant information from the management platform, and composed a personalised, accurate response. The manager sees the exchange in their queue the next morning. Everything is accurate. Nothing requires follow-up.
An owner emails asking for a copy of the AGM minutes from three years ago. The system identifies the request, retrieves the document, and attaches it to a reply within minutes.
A new owner emails to update their contact details. The system acknowledges the request, confirms the update has been noted, and routes the change to the appropriate workflow for processing.
None of this is aspirational. It is what strata businesses using proper AI platforms are doing today.
The emails that do require a strata manager — the ones involving disputes, complex compliance questions, sensitive committee matters — continue to be handled by your team. They just land in a queue that does not also contain 35 routine information requests that could have been automated.
Your manager opens their inbox on a Wednesday morning and sees twelve emails. Not 80. Twelve that actually need them.
That is what the change looks like. And it is available now.
Dasun Premadasa is the founder of Merlo AI, a purpose-built AI platform for strata management businesses. Merlo AI handles routine owner communication, document requests, and workflow automation — freeing strata managers to focus on the work that actually requires them. Book a free Merlo Health Check at merlo.ai