20180801 (Wed)
Is your car park calculated in your payment of service charge?
The law – Strata Titles Act (amended 2013) and Strata Management Act 2013 enforced June, 2015 do not provide exactly how to calculated service charge. However, both laws provided the concept that charges should be shared out equally to maintain the property.
In such spirit, the total cost of maintenance should be paid from the contribution of all parcel owners fairly and equally. As to how this is calculated, it is the decision of the management committee in the Management Corporation (MC).
Take for example, if the total running cost of the MC is RM100,000 per month, and there are 1,000 parcels of equal sizes, then, the monthly service charge should be RM100 per parcel. Whether it includes car park or not is not really a matter of dispute. This is because all parcels are equal. Inevitably, this is not the situation in most cases.
Some parcels are bigger, some people has got more car parks, etc. Hence, the calculation becomes a matter of dispute as it weighs more for one than the other. Nevertheless, the concept is to share out equally to every parcel owner as the law says.
Therefore, if the MC were to decide to include the car parks, those with more car parks will not be happy. For pre-MC (in most cases for older condo without title), the Deeds of Mutual Covenants spelled out the way it is charged. Hence, there should not be any dispute over it as every purchaser is told the charges when they agreed to buy the parcels.
Only when the MC is formed (with issuance of titles), that the committee running the MC would have to decide if including car parks should be the method to allocate the cost of maintaining the property.