Pothole in a Business Park Accessway: Who Pays?
You run a business from a unit in an Auckland industrial park. Between your roller door and the street sits fifty metres of shared accessway, and in it, growing since autumn, a pothole every one of your staff, customers and couriers drives through. You'd happily just pay to fix it, except a suspicion nags: is this even yours to fix?
Usually not alone, and paying for shared asphalt out of one unit's pocket is a mistake that's hard to unwind. Two minutes on the structure first.
Find out what the accessway legally is
Most Auckland business parks built since the eighties are unit title developments: you (or your landlord) own the unit, and the driveways, visitor parks and manoeuvring areas are common property owned collectively through the body corporate. Under the Unit Titles Act the body corporate must repair and maintain common property, funded by levies from all owners. If your park is unit title, the accessway pothole belongs to every owner jointly, through the body corporate, and that's who engages the contractor.
The other common structure is a cross lease or fee simple lots with a shared right of way, where an easement gives each lot access and the easement instrument (or, failing that, the Property Law Act) splits maintenance between the users, typically by share of use or equally. No body corporate, no levies; just owners who need to agree.
Which one you're in takes one look at the record of title, and if you rent, your landlord or property manager knows. Ask before spending.
Why "I'll just fix it myself" backfires
Beyond generosity, there are real problems with unilaterally patching common property. You've spent money you likely can't recover, since recovering it needs exactly the owner agreement you skipped. If the repair is on common property, you may have needed body corporate consent to alter it at all. And you've set a precedent the other owners will happily honour: the unit that fixes things becomes the unit that fixes things.
The productive version of the same impulse costs you a few photos. Document the pothole, get a fixed written price, and put that number in front of the body corporate or the other owners. A specific price with photos gets decisions; "we should do something about the driveway" gets deferred. This is the same one-page-that-survives-forwarding logic our office manager guide runs on, aimed at a committee instead of a boss.
Tenants: route it, don't fund it
If you lease the unit, the accessway is almost never your repair. Your lease makes you responsible (at most) for your premises and your share of outgoings; common area repairs are the landlord's or body corporate's, potentially recoverable through outgoings later. Your move is notification: photos, date, hazard note, sent to the property manager in writing. You've shifted the liability clock onto the right party, which matters, because a courier who goes through that pothole on a hand truck is currently everyone's problem and specifically nobody's.
One honest caveat: if the damage sits inside your own exclusive-use yard or parks rather than the shared area, it may well be yours under the lease, particularly under full repairing terms. The record of title and the lease plan settle where that line runs.
Getting a body corporate to yes before spring
Commercial body corporates move faster than residential ones (fewer owners, more of them businesses that price hazards professionally), but the same physics applies to the agenda as to the asphalt: things left to next meeting grow. A pothole quoted at patch prices in July is a saw-cut rectangle and a morning's work; the same failure after a winter of loaded couriers pumping water through it is triple the area, as covered in the ponding post. Most body corporate committees hold delegated authority for maintenance under a threshold, and a fixed-price patch usually fits inside it. That's the quote to circulate: specific, warranted, small enough to approve by email.
Frequently asked questions
The developer still owns half the units. Does that change anything?
The mechanics stay the same; the developer is just a large-voting owner. Practically, developers approve visible-hazard repairs readily since they're still selling units past that pothole.
Can the body corporate bill the tenant whose trucks caused it?
Ordinary wear from lawful use is shared maintenance, however unevenly it accrues. Provable one-off damage (a dropped skip, a tracked digger) can sometimes be recovered from the party who caused it; photos and dates decide those arguments.
Who should actually submit the quote request?
Anyone can; approval is what needs the right party. In practice it's usually the on-site owner who's sick of the noise, armed with photos and the form, and the fixed price does the persuading from there.
Check the title, photograph the hole, and put a real number in front of the people who share it. Shared asphalt gets fixed when someone makes the price concrete.
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