Body Corporate Painting Auckland: What It Takes to Repaint an Apartment Block

Quick answer: Body corporate painting in Auckland is the repaint of shared building elements — cladding, roofs, balustrades, corridors and common joinery — organised and funded by the body corporate under the Unit Titles Act 2010, not by individual unit owners.

Most painting jobs start with someone deciding they want a change of colour. A body corporate repaint doesn’t work like that. It starts with a line item in a maintenance plan, moves through a committee, and only becomes a real job once enough owners have voted for it. The paint is the last part of the conversation, and usually the easiest.

We get these enquiries from three people: a building manager who has watched the south elevation go chalky for two winters, a committee chair who has been handed the job of getting three quotes, or a body corporate manager working through a maintenance plan that says the exterior is due. All three are asking the same question in different words. What does it actually take to get this building painted, and how long is it going to take to get everyone to agree?

That question has almost nothing to do with paint. It has everything to do with the Unit Titles Act 2010, the building’s long-term maintenance plan, and how carefully the scope was written before the quotes went out. Get those three right and the job runs. Get them wrong and you are back at another general meeting six months later, holding three quotes that can’t be compared to each other.

This article covers the process side of an apartment or unit-block repaint in Auckland: who owns the paint, how the spending gets approved, how to write a scope that produces comparable quotes, and what changes when the building is full of people who live there. It doesn’t cover pricing. Every cost question belongs on our commercial painting cost calculator and our commercial painting guide, which is where our real project figures live. What follows is the part nobody explains.

What the Body Corporate Actually Owns, and Why the Paint Is Its Problem

Start with the boundary. An owner owns their unit; the body corporate is responsible for everything shared. Paint sits on the shared side of that line far more often than owners expect, and the Act is unusually direct about why.

The duty to repair and maintain

Section 138 of the Unit Titles Act 2010 says the body corporate must repair and maintain the common property, any assets designed for use in connection with the common property, any other assets it owns, and “any building elements and infrastructure that relate to or serve more than 1 unit”. The same section spells out that the duty to repair and maintain includes a duty “to keep in a good state of repair, and to renew where necessary”.

The word doing the heavy lifting is “building elements”. The Act defines it as the external and internal components of any part of a building that are necessary to the structural integrity of the building, the exterior aesthetics of the building, or the health and safety of the people who occupy or use it.

Exterior aesthetics. That phrase is why a repaint of the cladding on a 24-unit block in Ellerslie is the body corporate’s job and not a series of arguments between owners about who paints which section of wall. Paint is a building element by definition, and maintaining it is a statutory duty rather than a discretionary tidy-up.

Where the boundary gets genuinely blurry

Cladding, soffits, fascias, common stairwells, corridors and the underside of walkways are almost always the body corporate’s. Roofs on a shared building are too. So are balustrades and handrails that form part of the building envelope.

Then there is the middle ground. Balcony soffits and balcony walls. Front doors that face a common corridor. Window joinery. Garage doors that read as part of the elevation. Whether these fall to the body corporate or the owner depends on where the unit boundary sits on the deposited unit plan and what the body corporate’s operational rules say. There is no universal answer, and any painter who gives you one without reading your plan is guessing.

🎨 Painting tip: Before you request a single quote, produce a one-page element schedule that lists every painted surface on the building and marks it body corporate, owner, or unresolved. The unresolved column is your real agenda item, and it is far cheaper to settle it in a committee meeting than halfway through a scaffold hire.

Costs that can be recovered from an individual owner

Section 138 also allows the body corporate to recover costs relating to repairs or maintenance of building elements and infrastructure contained inside a principal unit from the owner of that unit, as a debt. The same section gives the body corporate the right to access any unit at all reasonable hours to carry out repairs and maintenance.

In practice that matters on interior work. If a corridor repaint requires entry to a unit to reach a shared riser or a common wall, that access right exists. It should still be handled with proper notice and an agreed time, because a painter turning up unannounced at a stranger’s front door is how a straightforward job turns into a complaint at the next general meeting.

What Auckland’s unit stock actually looks like

The buildings behind these enquiries are not one type. Auckland’s body corporate stock splits roughly four ways, and the split matters because it changes the coating system and the access method.

There are the 1960s and 70s brick-and-block walk-ups through Papatoetoe, Onehunga, Manurewa and parts of Mt Eden, usually two or three storeys with exposed concrete stairs and painted metal handrails. There are the monolithic plaster developments built through the late 1990s and 2000s across Ellerslie, Glen Eden, Albany and the isthmus, which carry weathertightness history and need a coating system chosen with that in mind. There are the CBD, Takapuna and Newmarket towers where nothing gets done without a traffic management plan. And there is the newer stock in Hobsonville Point, Long Bay and Flat Bush, where the first full repaint cycle is arriving now.

A quote that doesn’t name which of those it is pricing hasn’t been thought about properly. The commercial repaint work we take on across Auckland gets scoped building by building for that reason, and you can see the range of it on our commercial painting page.

The Long-Term Maintenance Plan Decides When You Paint

This is the section that stalls apartment repaints, and it has nothing to do with painting.

Every body corporate must have a plan, and it must reach at least ten years

Section 116 of the Act requires a body corporate to establish and regularly maintain a long-term maintenance plan, and that plan must cover a period of at least 10 years from the date of the plan or its last review. Its stated purpose is to identify future maintenance requirements and estimate the costs involved, support the funds, provide a basis for levying owners, and give the body corporate ongoing guidance for its annual maintenance decisions.

Exterior painting is one of the largest single line items in most of those plans. It usually sits alongside roofing, membrane replacement and lift servicing as the handful of items that drive the levy.

Buildings with ten or more units carry a heavier obligation

The Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2022 inserted a whole new part of the Act for large unit title developments, defined as a development that includes 10 or more principal units. Per the Government’s unit titles guidance, those developments must have a maintenance plan covering 30 years from commencement or last review, with detailed costings required for the first 10 years of anticipated maintenance and higher-level information for years 11 to 30. The plan must be reviewed every three years, or as soon as practicable if something arises that materially affects it.

The same rules require the body corporate to consult a building professional or other suitably qualified professional when it develops or reviews the plan, unless it decides by special resolution not to. That consultation is the moment to get the paint line right, and it is routinely the moment it gets wrong. A number carried forward from a plan written before the last two rounds of material and labour movement will not survive contact with a real quote.

🎨 Painting tip: If your building’s maintenance plan is inside its three-year review window, get a painter on site during the review rather than after it. A current, measured allowance in the plan is worth more to the committee than three quotes obtained in a hurry two years later.

The 10% rule that nobody warns you about

This is the mechanism that turns a three-week repaint into a six-month process.

Section 117 of the Act covers the long-term maintenance fund. A body corporate must establish and maintain one unless it decides by special resolution not to, and if it has opted out it must review that decision annually. The fund can only be spent on things relating to the maintenance plan.

Then comes subsection 3. The body corporate must, by special resolution, approve any amount to be spent on any one maintenance item if that amount exceeds the figure specified for that item in the long-term maintenance plan by more than 10%.

Read that again with a painting quote in your hand. If the plan allowed a certain figure for the exterior repaint and the accepted quote lands more than a tenth above it, the committee cannot simply sign. It needs a special resolution. Under section 98 of the Act, a special resolution passes only when 75% of the eligible voters who vote on it vote in favour, with one vote per principal unit. A resolution can also be passed without a meeting if it is signed by not less than 75% of eligible voters.

So the accuracy of the plan’s paint allowance is not an accounting detail. It is the difference between a decision the committee can make and a decision that needs three quarters of a building to agree, at a meeting that may be months away.

How to work with the rule instead of against it

Three things make the difference here, and all of them happen before quotes are requested.

Break the quote down the way the plan does. If the maintenance plan carries separate lines for exterior cladding, roof and common interiors, ask for the pricing split the same way. A single lump sum forces every line into one comparison against one plan figure, and it hides which element caused the overrun.

Price the building as it is, not as the plan assumed. Plans written off a desktop review routinely miss the repair work that a proper site inspection finds: failed sealant, rusted balustrade fixings, delaminating render, rotten timber behind a downpipe. Those are found early or found on scaffold, and finding them on scaffold is what produces variations.

Take the resolution question to the committee before it is urgent. If the numbers are heading past the plan’s allowance, the honest move is to say so early enough for the resolution to be put on a scheduled general meeting agenda rather than forcing a special one. We are painters, not body corporate lawyers, and questions about how your particular plan and rules operate belong with your body corporate manager or a lawyer who works in this area.

Writing a Scope That Makes Apartment Painting Quotes Comparable

The most common thing we see on tender-style enquiries is three quotes that cannot be compared to each other, because each painter has scoped a different job. One has priced two coats over a wash. One has priced full preparation including render repairs. One has priced the exterior only and left the corridors out entirely. The committee then does the only thing available to it and compares the bottom line, which is how a building ends up with the cheapest scope rather than the best value.

Fix the elements list before you fix the price

A scope that produces comparable quotes names every painted surface and states what happens to it. Cladding, soffits, fascias and barge boards. Balcony walls and ceilings. Balustrades, handrails and any painted steelwork. Common corridors, stairwells, lift lobbies and ceilings. Entry doors, letterbox banks, service cupboards, bin room, garage walls and line marking. Roof, gutters and downpipes if they are in scope.

For each one, the scope should state the preparation, the number of coats, and the product. That is the entire basis of comparison. Without it, a quote is a number attached to an opinion.

The wash is not optional, and it is not the same job everywhere

Every exterior repaint on a shared building starts with a wash, and on a multi-storey block the wash is a proper piece of work rather than an afternoon with a hose. Mould and lichen on a south elevation in a shaded Auckland courtyard behave very differently to a north-facing wall. Getting the difference wrong costs you adhesion.

We wrote a full breakdown of the two methods and where each one causes damage in our guide to house washing vs water blasting, and the same logic applies on a unit block with more at stake, because you are washing above occupied balconies and open windows. The wash-down work that goes in ahead of the first coat should appear as its own line in the scope.

Substrate honesty on plaster buildings

If the building is monolithic plaster from the leaky-building era, this section is the most important one in your scope.

Paint is a coating. It is not a weathertightness remedy. MBIE’s guidance on weathertightness is clear that keeping moisture out of a building is a function of the whole cladding system, its junctions and its flashings. Where a plaster building has cracking, failed junctions or a history of moisture ingress, the right first call is a building surveyor, not a painter.

Where the substrate is sound and a coating system is genuinely what the building needs, there are products built for the job. Resene’s X-200 acrylic weathertight membrane is a high-build membrane specified for plaster and concrete surfaces, and its data sheet notes that its film build will completely fill cracks up to 1mm. It also flags that the fibre reinforcement in the product can clog finer spray filters, which is the kind of detail that separates a painter who has specified it before from one reading the label on site.

Important note: A repaint over a plaster building with an unresolved moisture problem seals the appearance and leaves the cause. Any decision about cladding performance, remediation or building consent needs a suitably qualified building professional, and consenting questions go to Auckland Council or a Licensed Building Practitioner.

Products, and why the specification should name them

On exterior cladding, Resene Lumbersider is the waterborne low-sheen workhorse for Auckland’s climate. Dulux Weathershield covers the same ground. Common interiors take a different product again, with Resene SpaceCote Low Sheen and Dulux Wash & Wear both built for surfaces that get touched constantly, which is exactly what a corridor wall in a 40-unit building is.

Naming the product in the scope is the simplest anti-corner-cutting device available to a committee. It also matters at the next repaint, because the maintenance plan is more useful when it records what went on the building last time.

Colour, and getting forty owners to agree

Colour is where the process most often turns political. The way through it is procedural rather than aesthetic.

Most committees delegate colour selection to a small subcommittee with a defined shortlist, then confirm the choice at a meeting. Resene and Dulux both hold thousands of colours, so the shortlist is the entire job. We put sample areas on the actual building rather than working from chips, because a colour on a rendered wall in Auckland’s light behaves nothing like the same colour on a card indoors. Our free colour consultation exists for this exact scenario, and having someone independent present a shortlist takes the personal edge off the decision.

🎨 Painting tip: Put the sample patches on the elevation nobody likes. If a colour holds up on the weathered south face in winter light, it will look fine on the street frontage. Choosing from the best-looking wall flatters every option equally and tells you nothing.

Painting a Building That People Are Living In

An empty commercial fit-out can be sequenced around a programme. An occupied apartment block has to be sequenced around residents, and that is where most of the friction in these jobs comes from.

Scaffold and access have their own approval process

This is the second timing trap after the special resolution, and it catches people who have never run a job on a street frontage.

If the work touches the road corridor in Auckland, it needs a Corridor Access Request. Auckland Transport lists the non-excavation activities that require one, and the list includes putting up temporary scaffolding, whether mobile or fixed, and using or parking machinery such as cranes, cherry pickers and water blasters. It also covers applying for a full or partial road or footpath closure to work on or above the road.

Applications must be made at least 15 working days before work starts, and Auckland Transport is explicit that submitting an application is not authority to start work. You wait for the approved permit. For a CBD or Takapuna building with a footpath frontage, that lead time sits in front of every other date in the programme, so it belongs in the schedule the day the job is awarded rather than the week before the scaffold arrives.

Working at height, and the myth that keeps circulating

There is a persistent belief in the trades that safety controls only kick in above three metres. It is wrong, and WorkSafe says so directly.

The working at height guidance describes the “three-metre rule” as a mistaken belief, states that reasonable and practicable steps must be taken wherever there is potential for a person at work to fall from any height, and notes that more than half of the falls it investigated were from under three metres. The control is chosen by assessing the actual task, not by measuring to a threshold.

For a body corporate that translates into one practical question to ask every painter quoting: what access method have you priced, and why. Scaffold, mobile elevating work platform, or rope access all produce different prices, different programmes and different amounts of disruption to residents. A quote that leaves it unstated has left a large variable out.

Residents need lead time, not a notice on the lift door

The communication plan is part of the job, not an afterthought. On an occupied block, residents need to know, well ahead of the crew arriving on their elevation:

Which face of the building is being worked on and for roughly how long. What has to come off balconies and when. Which days windows need to stay shut, particularly during washing and spraying. Where washing lines can and can’t be used. What happens to their parking. Who to call when something goes wrong, and it will, because a hundred people share a building.

Working hours and noise are set by the body corporate’s operational rules and the council’s noise controls, and they are worth confirming in writing before the programme is fixed. On buildings with shift workers or young children, a committee will sometimes negotiate a later start on the residential faces. That is far easier to agree in advance than to renegotiate on day three.

Security, keys and strangers on site

A repaint puts a crew inside a secured building for weeks. Fobs, gate codes, lift access and after-hours arrangements all need to be agreed with the building manager and documented. Uniformed, identifiable crews matter more here than on any residential job, because residents are being asked to walk past unfamiliar people in their own corridors every morning.

Auckland weather still runs the programme

Exterior coatings need dry surfaces, workable temperatures and enough of a window to cure. Auckland’s winter is the wet, humid end of the year, and on a large building the exposed elevations, overnight dew and shaded courtyard walls all dry at different rates.

Practically, that means the exterior stages of a body corporate repaint want the drier, warmer part of the year, and the programme needs weather float built into it rather than bolted on when it rains. Common interiors are the sensible thing to schedule into the wet months, which is one of the reasons splitting the scope by element is useful in the first place.

How Superior Painters Runs a Body Corporate Painting Project in Auckland

Committees and building managers are accountable to owners, so the reporting matters almost as much as the painting. Here is how we set these jobs up.

Site walk first, quote second

We walk the building with the building manager or a committee member, and we ask for the unit plan and the current maintenance plan before we price anything. That walk produces the element schedule: every painted surface, its condition, its preparation requirement, its coating system and who owns it. The quote is built off that schedule, which is why it can be compared line for line against anyone else’s.

If the walk turns up something that isn’t a painting problem, we say so. A rusting balustrade fixing, a failed junction on a plaster elevation or a roof that has passed the point where coating helps all get flagged in writing rather than painted over. Telling a committee that part of its scope needs a different trade is a better outcome than a warranty argument in two winters.

A dedicated project manager on the building

Every Superior Painters job runs with a dedicated project manager as the single point of contact, on site daily and reporting progress. On a body corporate job that person is the interface between the crew and the building manager, and they own the resident communication, the staging plan and the variation register.

Committees generally need something they can put in front of owners. Progress reporting by elevation and by stage, with photographs, does that job. It also settles the question that gets asked at every general meeting during a long programme, which is what exactly has been done so far.

Finishing properly

Every job closes out against our 97-point inspection checklist, which is the standardised quality control we run at completion across residential and commercial work alike. On a multi-stage building that happens per stage rather than only at the end, so a completed elevation gets signed off while the scaffold is still there and access is cheap.

The Picture Perfect guarantee sits behind the result. Superior Painters is 100% NZ owned, works Auckland-wide from Pukekohe to the Hibiscus Coast, and is part of the Superior Construction Group, which means the trades a repaint sometimes uncovers are available through the same network.

🎨 Painting tip: Ask any painter quoting your building for a staged handover rather than one completion date. Signing off elevation by elevation while the access is still up is the cheapest defect remedy available on a multi-storey job.

Where to start if your building is due

If the exterior is chalking, the corridors are marked up, or the maintenance plan says the repaint is coming, the useful first step is a site walk and a written element schedule. That gives the committee something concrete to work from, whether the job runs this year or gets programmed into the next plan review. Commercial enquiries come through our enquiry page, and we are happy to attend a committee meeting to talk the scope through before anything is priced.

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Body Corporate Painting Auckland: Frequently Asked Questions

WRITTEN BY SUPERIOR PAINTERS

Superior Painters is Auckland’s trusted house painting and commercial painting specialist. We offer interior painting, exterior painting, roof painting, plastering, wood staining, and house washing — with a dedicated project manager for every job and a free colour consultation service. 100% NZ owned. Auckland-wide coverage.

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References

1. New Zealand Legislation — Unit Titles Act 2010
2. Unit Titles Act 2010, section 116 — Long-term maintenance plan
3. Unit Titles Act 2010, section 117 — Long-term maintenance fund
4. Unit Titles Act 2010, section 138 — Body corporate duties of repair and maintenance
5. Unit Titles Act 2010, section 98 — Special resolutions
6. Unit Titles (NZ Government) — Unit title maintenance and long-term maintenance planning
7. Auckland Transport — Check if you need a Corridor Access Request
8. WorkSafe New Zealand — Working at height in New Zealand
9. MBIE Building Performance — Weathertightness
10. Resene Data Sheet D62 — Resene X-200 acrylic weathertight membrane
11. Resene Data Sheet D34 — Resene Lumbersider
12. Resene Data Sheet D311 — Resene SpaceCote Low Sheen