Community title - Western Australia’s new land tenure system

WA’s newest form of land tenure – a community title – will become available on 30 June 2021 when the Community Titles Act 2018 takes effect.

What is community title?
You may have heard of strata title before and community title has some features similar to strata title such as having an owners corporation (community corporation) to make decisions, by-laws to govern the scheme, its own common property and levies (contributions) to pay for common costs.

Community title also allows for a variety of land tenures to be included within one community scheme, i.e. creating “schemes within schemes” that is not possible with strata title that only allows land to be divided into lots and common property.

By way of example, a community scheme could consist of a strata titled apartment building, a strata titled office building and survey-strata titled houses. This community scheme could include common property for the use of all owners (such as parks) or exclusive access for owners of the apartments and houses only (such as a swimming pool or rooftop barbeque area).

Now that there can be multiple schemes under one ‘umbrella’ scheme, more kinds of development are going to be possible in WA which brings benefit to both the community and the economy. The potential for more innovative projects can be seen in other states (such as Queensland) where community title is well established. It is likely that we’ll see better designed developments that include residential units, retail shops, commercial gyms all governed under uniform set of rules but with each sector managed separately.

Nicholas Wilkinson

Legal Advisor

Nick is an empathetic and assertive property lawyer with success in translating complex legal issues for clients, negotiating favourable outcomes and building stakeholder relationships. His key strengths include connecting with people and solving problems on the go. In his spare time, you will find him exploring sound design and electronic music production.