What to do if its your First AGM, or if your committee all resigned?

Ok so there are two different scenarios here, the first is if you have never had an AGM for your building or a legal management committee, and the second is if you have had meeting in the past and a committee elected but they all resigned or it just disbanded.

If you have never had an AGM

This is actually a little easier as you can just call the first general meeting without any major hoops to jump through.  You simply place a notice up 8 days before the meeting in a conspicuous place giving the date/time and location for the first meeting.

At this first meeting everyone should be entitled to vote.  Now their may be owners who have not paid the developer, but if you don’t have accounts or if they were not issued under the authority of the committee it’s most likely the developer’s private dealings to recover this debt.

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the information to set budgets and issue fees now, just get the ball rolling by electing the first committee.  

It’s the committee that set the budget and collect the fees so get them elected at this meeting and start working with the information you have. Once you have the necessary information you don’t need to call another general meeting you can simply set a budget and start billing unit owners under the authority and powers of the management committee.  You can find out more about setting budgets on my website.

What if you don’t have the owner database

I find that most developments don’t call a meeting because they think they need to have all the information on the owners first.  And as they don’t have this information it just sits in limbo.

The problem is, you need a management committee to have the legal authority to hold a database of unit owners and residents.  So, if you ask a developer or manager for this without a legal committee being in place, they will likely shoot you down quoting GDPR.

But fortunately, you don’t really need owner data to call the first general meeting.  Just put up a notice in the building at least 8 days before the meeting with the date, time and location and start collecting the information from this meeting onwards.

You are highly unlikely to get quorum at this meeting, but this isn’t a problem as you can simply postpone it for a week, and at the second meeting whoever turns up after 30 minutes is quorum and the meeting can go ahead. 

At this meeting you elect your new committee, and now this committee has the legal authority to hold the data of unit owners.  You may still get pushback from developers or management companies worried about loosing maintenance contracts so you may need the assistance of a lawyer to force them to disclose this information.

If you have had a previous AGM, and an elected committee but it disbanded.

If you have had a meeting before, but the committee disbanded or simply collapsed then its slightly more complicated.  But still workable

Basically you need to get 25% of the unit owners to collectively request a EGM to elect a new committee.  You may not have any existing committee to serve this to, so you can just post this letter on the notice board.  Under the rules if the existing committee don’t call the meeting within 14 days, you can go ahead and organise your own meeting.  Well you know the committee wont respond as they no longer exist so this should not be a problem.

What if you cannot get the 25% to sign the letter.

Worse case, you can go to the land registry and explain that you don’t have a committee and have not had an AGM and request their intervention.  They have powers to call a General meeting and elect a committee if owners fail to do so.  But this will take time and I am sure will involve lots of paperwork.

Organising the meeting.

Once you have got to the situation of holding a meeting, you can simply follow the steps in one of my videos, articles or live training sessions on the actual meeting structure.  Just go to my site www.CypruscommunalGuide.com for more information.

If all of the above seems a bit too much, I do also offer a Done for you AGM service where my team will take over all of the above steps and even come to your meeting to guide you through all requirements of the meeting.  Basically you just need to turn up to the meeting.  I will put a link to this service in the video description below.  This package also includes a free 1-1 consultation with me so we can put together an action plan for you so is very handy if you want to fast track the process.