MRI Strata Master Virtual Assistant: a VA who works your levy arrears and builds your meeting packs

Nobody searches “strata master virtual assistant” from a position of calm. You search it in AGM season, when three notices are due out this week, the aged arrears report has lots on it that were there last quarter, a committee chair wants to know why the balcony repair from March is still an open work order, and the portfolio manager who should be fixing all of it is answering the forty-first owner email of the day.

Strata management has a maths problem the whole industry knows about: portfolios keep growing, experienced managers keep leaving, and the ones who stay carry more schemes than the job was designed for. MRI Strata Master, the old Rockend workhorse that a large share of Australian firms still run, holds all of the work neatly. It just does not do any of it. Someone has to work the arrears list, chase the quotes, assemble the meeting packs and answer the inbox, and that someone does not need to be your most expensive licensed manager. It can be a trained VA working AU business hours inside your database.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Strata Master

The day opens in the inbox, because in strata it always does. Levy balance requests, meeting date queries, “when is the plumber coming” follow-ups, all answered from templates your firm has approved, with the reply logged against the lot. Anything with teeth, a by-law dispute, a legal letter, an insurance claim, a committee member unhappy in bold type, goes straight to the portfolio manager with the relevant file already pulled. MRI markets Merlo AI at exactly this load, which tells you how real it is; a VA clears it with judgement about what escalates.

Then the money admin. Levies in Strata Master run on the cycle the budget set, and the Levy Wizard generates the notices, but the human tail is long: owners who moved and never updated their notice address, requests for a reissued notice, questions about the DEFT reference on the bottom of the page, a payment that landed against the wrong lot and needs flagging to your trust accountant. Your VA carries that tail so the levy cycle stops generating a week of interruptions each quarter.

Arrears get worked to a written, staged process, weekly and without mercy for the schedule. First stage, the reminder letter from your approved template. Second stage, the final notice, with overdue interest applied the way your state’s legislation prescribes, ten per cent simple interest in NSW once a levy is a month overdue, different rules elsewhere, and your VA follows the rule for the scheme’s state, not a generic one. Third stage is a decision, not a letter: the VA prepares a clean arrears schedule per scheme so the committee can resolve to refer a lot to debt recovery, because in most states that referral needs the owners corporation’s say-so, not an assistant’s initiative. Every contact is logged against the lot, so when a matter does escalate, the ledger and the correspondence trail already agree.

Repairs and maintenance run through work orders. An owner reports a leaking common-area tap; the VA raises the work order against the right plan and the right creditor, issues quote requests to the scheme’s preferred contractors where the spend needs quotes, then does the part software never does: chases. The contractor who has not returned the quote, the job marked started three weeks ago, the invoice that arrived without a work order number. The open work order list gets reviewed weekly, and jobs get closed off with the paperwork filed, so a committee meeting stops being an ambush of “whatever happened to” questions.

Meeting season is where a Strata Master VA earns the year’s fee. The Meeting Wizard builds AGM and committee meeting notices, and your VA drives it: agenda assembled, owner-submitted motions added verbatim, financial statements, budget, insurance summary and any quotes for decision attached, and the notice issued inside the statutory notice period for the scheme’s state, by post or email according to each owner’s recorded preference. After the meeting, the VA types first-draft minutes from the manager’s notes and the motion outcomes, ready for the manager to correct and finalise. Multiply that by an AGM calendar of eighty or two hundred schemes and you can see why meeting prep is the task strata clients hand over first.

Underneath it all sits register hygiene. Settlements come with change-of-ownership notices that need processing so the strata roll stays true. Committee members change. Insurance renewals, sums insured and valuation due dates live in the insurance register and are only useful if someone keeps them current. Fire safety statement deadlines, WHS reports and lift inspections sit in the diary and get booked, chased and filed. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a certificate request that takes ten minutes and one that takes a day of archaeology.

The honest bit

Strata Master will not do any of this by itself, and it is worth being plain about where the software stops.

It is a system of record, not an engine. The Levy Wizard raises notices on the cycle, but nothing in Strata Master rings an owner about a payment plan, escalates an arrears file at the right moment, or chases a contractor’s quote. The staged arrears machinery only moves when a person moves it. That is the entire reason an AI assistant like Merlo is now sold for the strata inbox: the platform has always assumed a human is doing the doing.

The Meeting Wizard produces notices and minutes templates, not judgement. It will not tell you whether a motion is validly framed, whether a quorum was met, or how a manager should advise a committee on a contested by-law. It formats; the licensed manager decides.

State differences are on you, not the software. Interest on overdue levies, notice periods for meetings, when recovery action needs a resolution: the rules differ between NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the rest, and Strata Master will happily let you do the wrong thing in the wrong state. Your VA works to a per-state procedure your firm signs off, which is exactly why we put everything through templates and written rules rather than initiative.

And it is a database that is only as good as its strata roll. If ownership changes were never processed, creditors are duplicated and half the work orders from 2024 are still open, the first fortnight of a VA placement is partly an honest clean-up. The value compounds after that, but expect the archaeology.

What stays with you

Strata management is licensed work with trust money in the middle of it, so the line is bright and we hold it from our side too.

Your VA does the operational and administrative layer: arrears letters to your staged process, levy notice admin, work order raising and chasing, meeting pack assembly, minutes drafting, register maintenance and inbox triage. They do not advise a committee, interpret a by-law, decide when an arrears file goes to recovery, or set a levy, levies are determined by the owners corporation at a general meeting, not by anyone’s assistant. Certificates and statutory documents go out under your licensed manager’s authority, and anything that smells like legal or insurance advice escalates under a written rule.

The trust account is the hardest line of all. Receipting levy income, processing creditor payments and releasing EFT runs are licensed-agent functions in every state, and the VA’s Strata Master permissions simply do not include them. They can prepare, reconcile-check and flag up to the point of sign-off; the authorisation is never theirs. That is a permission structure, not a promise.

What it costs and where to start

Strata Master admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most strata placements run 10 to 15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month for someone working arrears weekly, chasing every open work order and carrying meeting prep through AGM season.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with a $500 refundable deposit credited to your first month. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your Strata Master before any solo work, starting on arrears letters and work order follow-up because both are templated and easy to audit. After that you are covered by a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We have made 87+ placements into Australian businesses since 2024, and Jenn takes every discovery call herself.

For the wider vertical picture, the strata managers page goes deeper on how firms structure the role. The meeting minutes task page covers how we handle minutes drafting, the invoice chasing page shows the arrears cadence in detail, and the VA cost guide lays out the full pricing maths against a local hire. When you are ready, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring your aged arrears report.