Before you ask what the owners decided, ask who had capacity to decide it.

What the association legally is, and who can actually contract and sue on its behalf

This is the first question in every jointly owned property matter, and the one most often assumed rather than checked, because both emirates have moved.

Under Dubai's earlier regime an owners association arose by operation of law once units began to sell, and held its own legal personality: it contracted, banked, sued and was sued in its own name. Much of the documentation still in circulation was drafted on that footing and never revisited.

Dubai Law No. 6 of 2019 restructured the arrangement, moving management toward licensed entities supervised by the Dubai Land Department, with owners represented through a committee rather than a body corporate constituted automatically by statute. The functional consequences decide cases: who holds the community's money, who is the counterparty on a maintenance contract, and in whose name a claim against a defaulting owner is brought. Abu Dhabi provides for owner-level governance within its own structure under Abu Dhabi Law No. 3 of 2015, administered by the Abu Dhabi Real Estate Centre. The amendment made by Law No. 2 of 2025, in force 2 August 2025, replaced the former owners' union with an owners' committee and defined its roles, responsibilities and governance procedures more clearly, so an Abu Dhabi document drafted earlier names a body that no longer exists in that form.

For a board member, establish before signing which entity is the contracting party and whether you sign as principal or representative; signing in the wrong capacity creates personal exposure nobody explained to you. For a management company, the same check protects your fee entitlement. For an owner contemplating a challenge, capacity is the cheapest point available and should be tested before the merits are drafted. The boundary and quota questions beneath all of this sit on our strata title page.

The management company is an agent, not the community — and how it is replaced

Owners write to "the association" and receive a reply on the management company's letterhead, and thereafter treat the two as one thing. They are not. The manager is engaged under contract to execute decisions and run the building day to day. It does not own the decisions it implements and has no independent mandate to make them.

The distinction bites in three places. Liability: a complaint about a decision lies against the body that took it, a complaint about execution against the manager. Money: collections and reserve contributions are the community's funds, not the manager's working capital. Dubai's Mollak system, with a per-community escrow account, removed most of the discretion that used to exist here; Abu Dhabi has no equivalent platform, so the manager's own bookkeeping is the record, though since 2 August 2025 service charges there must be pre-approved by the Department of Municipalities and Transport before they are levied. Scope creep: managers who take procurement, budgeting or enforcement decisions without a resolution behind them create exposure for themselves and unenforceable acts for the community.

The 2025 amendment also brought property management and operations expressly within the real estate activities requiring a licence in Abu Dhabi, so a manager operating without one is exposed whatever its contract says.

Abu Dhabi then set out what a management company must do. Administrative Decision No. 25 of 2025, issued under Law No. 3 of 2015 as amended and in force since 28 February 2026, covers ownership and usufruct controls and the management of real estate, common areas and facilities. Under it a management company must be accredited by the Department of Municipalities and Transport, must run electronic management and accounting systems, must report to the authorities every six months, and cannot enter supply agreements without prior approval. For a board that converts several things previously matters of persuasion — get us the accounts, show us the supply contract — into obligations the manager owes independently of the community.

Replacing a manager is where boards most often act in the wrong order. Read the existing agreement for term, notice period, renewal mechanics and termination consequences; confirm the body proposing to terminate has capacity, at the required threshold, properly minuted; confirm the incoming manager is licensed and, in Abu Dhabi, accredited, and can be registered; confirm the regulator's requirements for the change, which in Dubai run through the Land Department framework and in Abu Dhabi through ADREC; then serve notice. One Abu Dhabi point cuts the other way: a manager that has committed specified breaches cannot have its appointment renewed, so a dissatisfied board should establish the compliance position before assuming it faces a negotiation. Boards that resolve first and read the contract afterwards find they have triggered a payout on an unexpired term, or that the incoming manager cannot be registered.

Board and committee composition, election and removal

The body representing owners is small by design — a handful of members drawn from the owners, serving fixed terms with staggered expiry so the whole body does not turn over at once. The constitutive documents and the applicable emirate framework fix the number, the eligibility conditions and the election method, and those documents are the starting point rather than any general principle.

Three eligibility questions recur and are better resolved before nominations open than after a contested result: whether a member must personally be a registered owner or a corporate owner may nominate a representative; whether an owner in service-charge arrears may stand or vote, a disqualification only usable if applied consistently rather than selectively against inconvenient candidates; and whether a member with a commercial relationship to the community may serve at all.

Election. Nomination periods, candidate disclosure and the counting method should be fixed in advance and published with the notice. Elections run to rules announced on the day are the easiest of all governance decisions to unwind.

Removal. Members are ordinarily removable by the owners at the prescribed threshold, and cease automatically on disqualifying events — sale of the unit, sustained arrears, failure to attend. For boards: a member who has been obstructive is not thereby removable; the question is whether a prescribed ground is made out and evidenced. For owners seeking removal: the disqualification route is usually faster and cleaner than a for-cause contest.

Developer control, the handover of control, and the conflict when the developer is also the manager

In the early life of a scheme the developer necessarily controls it: it appoints the first manager, sets the first budget and, holding unsold units, commands the votes to carry what it proposes. That is a feature of a building sold progressively, not a defect, and challenges treating the existence of developer control as the complaint tend to fail.

In Abu Dhabi the starting point moved on 2 August 2025. Under the amended law the developer is no longer the sole authority for forming the ownership association; the framework provides for owners themselves to organise and participate in governance through the owners' committee. A community still running on a developer-constituted arrangement put in place before that date should test it against the amended position rather than assume continuity. Dubai is unaffected and continues under Law No. 6 of 2019.

What is actionable in either emirate is specific. A first-year budget pitched below true operating cost to keep the advertised charge attractive, producing a step change in year two. A reserve left unfunded through the control period, so the first major replacement lands on owners who bought after the developer exited. A management agreement with a related entity at rates never market-tested, on a long term with punitive termination provisions. Developer-held units sitting in arrears while individual owners are pursued for smaller sums — the single most damaging fact an owner can put before a tribunal.

Handover of control is a process, not a date. What must transfer is not only the chairmanship: bank or escrow arrangements and signatory authority; the owner register with registered addresses; the ledger reconciled to a stated date; subsisting supplier contracts; as-built drawings, testing certificates, approvals and warranty assignments; the asset register and any reserve study; and the insurance policies with claims history, cover for common areas and liability being a standing requirement rather than a discretionary line. In Abu Dhabi the process now has a date at the front of it: under Administrative Decision No. 25 of 2025 a management company must be appointed within thirty days of the first unit being delivered. That is a deadline a developer can miss, and a missed one is documentary. Communities that take control without the records inherit obligations they cannot price and defect claims they cannot prove — see our common-area defects page.

Where the developer is also the manager, or the cooling supplier, the conflict is structural. The disciplined response is to make it visible and priced: disclose the relationship, market-test at renewal, identify the related-party line separately in the budget, and require the interested party to abstain from the decision approving its own remuneration.

Quorum, voting weight, proxies and the owner who lives abroad

Voting weight normally follows the entitlement quota declared in the constitutive documents, not a head count. The arithmetic of any meeting is therefore fixed before anyone speaks, and a single large component — a retail podium, a hotel floor plate, a block of unsold units — can be decisive on its own.

The practical problem in UAE schemes is not disagreement. It is absence. A substantial proportion of units in Dubai and Abu Dhabi jointly owned buildings are held by non-resident investors who never attend, never appoint a proxy and frequently never receive the notice, because the address on the register is years out of date. Quorum fails, the meeting is adjourned, and decisions requiring owner approval either stall or are taken at a reconvened meeting on a reduced threshold by a small and unrepresentative group. The second outcome is the one that gets challenged.

The measures that move the number are administrative rather than legal. Reconcile the owner register against the land registry rather than the manager's contact database. Give notice at the full prescribed period, in the prescribed manner, with provable evidence of despatch to each registered address. Circulate a compliant proxy form and state what happens if it is not returned. Where the documents permit written or electronic participation, use it — and where they do not, amending them to permit it is usually the highest-value governance change available to a scheme with a dispersed owner base. For an owner abroad: a proxy costs nothing, and an unreturned one is a vote handed to whoever did attend.

The annual general meeting, budget approval, and challenging a resolution

The annual meeting exists to receive the accounts for the year past, consider the manager's performance, approve the budget for the year ahead, deal with elections falling due, and resolve what has properly been placed on the agenda. A meeting that departs from its circulated agenda to take a substantive decision is exposed on that ground alone.

Budget approval sits at two levels, and the second is not a formality. Owner approval is the first. Regulatory approval is the second: in Dubai the annual budget is submitted for approval before charges are levied against owners, and Abu Dhabi runs its own pathway through ADREC, with service charges requiring pre-approval by the Department of Municipalities and Transport since 2 August 2025. That review is not confined to arithmetic — it looks to the contracts behind the lines, prior-year actuals and the reserve provision. A charge levied without an approved budget for the year, above the approved rate, or for a line the budget does not contain, is unenforceable however enthusiastically the owners voted for it. Collection sits on our service-charge recovery page.

Challenging a resolution. The procedural ground — short notice, defective agenda, quorum not made out, votes miscounted, a proxy in the wrong form — succeeds readily because it is documentary; its weakness is that the answer is usually to convene the meeting again and take the decision properly, so the challenger buys delay rather than a result. The substantive ground — that the decision was outside the power of the body taking it, or applied the constitutive documents unequally between owners — is harder to establish and far more valuable, because there is no clean way to re-take a decision that could not lawfully be taken.

For a board, minutes drafted the same week, recording notice given, the quorum computation, proxies accepted and the vote weight on each resolution. For an owner, object in writing at the meeting or immediately after.

What an owner is entitled to see

Information rights are the mechanism by which everything else on this page is actually enforced, and they are the first thing a defensive board or an under-performing manager restricts.

The material an owner would ordinarily expect access to is the community's own record of itself: the constitutive documents and amendments; the approved budget and the accounts; the manager's contract and principal supplier contracts; minutes and resolutions of general meetings and, subject to the documents, of the board; insurance policies; the reserve position and any study behind it; and the owner's own ledger. Dubai owners billed through Mollak see the approved rate, the budget lines and their own payment history directly, which resolves a large share of information disputes without correspondence. In Abu Dhabi the equivalent material is held by the manager and has to be requested, though there is more of it to ask for: the regulatory pre-approval of the service charge, the electronic accounting records and six-monthly reporting the manager must maintain, and the pre-purchase disclosure statement.

Two withholdings are genuine rather than defensive: personal data concerning other owners and residents, and privileged material or documents relating to live litigation with the requesting owner.

For boards and managers: publish the recurring documents on a standing basis rather than answering requests one at a time. Volume of requests is almost always a symptom of opacity. For owners: request in writing, identify the specific document rather than asking for "all records", and give a deadline. A written refusal with the reason stated is a more useful document to hold in a later challenge than a dozen unanswered calls.

Enforcing the community rules against an owner who will not comply

Short-let use in a building that prohibits it, an enclosed balcony, a structural alteration, commercial use of a residential unit, persistent nuisance, unauthorised work to shared plant. The community's instinct is to escalate. The sequence that survives contact with a tribunal starts further back.

First, establish that the obligation binds. Rules in the registered constitutive documents run with the land and bind every successor owner automatically. House rules adopted later, outside the rule-making power those documents confer, bind nobody — and an association enforcing a rule it never had power to make is the commonest reason an otherwise deserving action fails at the threshold. If the rule is wanted, amend the constitutive documents through their own mechanism.

In Abu Dhabi part of the answer no longer depends on the documents. Administrative Decision No. 25 of 2025 places obligations directly on unit owners: comply with the site and strata management systems, obtain written approval before any material alteration, and neither dispose of nor encumber common areas. The enclosed balcony and the structural alteration therefore have a footing that does not depend on whether the community's own rule was validly made — an alternative route where the registered documents are silent, not a substitute for reading them.

Second, confirm the decision to enforce was taken by the body with capacity, at the required threshold, minuted at the time. A manager acting alone is not the community. Third, serve a notice that can be acted on — the provision breached, the specific remedial act, a realistic period. Fourth, build the record before proceedings: dated photographs, correspondence, and where fire or structural questions arise, an expert opinion obtained in advance.

Venue differs by emirate and subject matter. Use breaches are ordinarily pursued as declaratory and mandatory relief, and where municipal or civil defence approvals have been breached, the regulatory route frequently produces compliance faster than a civil claim. Non-payment is a separate track, and a harder one in Abu Dhabi since the 2025 amendment, which allows restrictions on the property — including a prohibition on disposal — with fines reaching AED 2,000,000. For the owner on the receiving end: is the rule actually in the registered documents, and has it been enforced consistently against everyone? Selective enforcement is a real answer, and boards underestimate how often it is available. Forum allocation sits on our real estate disputes page.

Where this goes wrong

The failures below account for most of the governance files that reach us. Almost none of them required a lawyer to prevent.

1. Signing in the wrong capacity. A contract executed by a board member personally, or in the name of a body whose position has changed since the document was drafted. It becomes a preliminary objection, and it can become personal exposure.
2. Treating the manager as the community. Decisions taken at manager level without a resolution behind them, then relied on as though the owners had made them.
3. Quorum failure met by lowering the bar. A reconvened meeting on a reduced threshold, attended by a handful of owners, taking a decision with years of financial consequence.
4. A stale owner register. Notices sent to the address given at purchase five years ago. The meeting is exposed, the recovery notice is exposed, and neither defect is curable retrospectively.
5. Minutes written when the dispute starts. No contemporaneous record of notice, quorum, proxies or the count. The board argues about what happened rather than proving it.
6. Decisions taken outside the circulated agenda. Convenient on the day, fatal on review.
7. Enforcing a rule the association had no power to make. House rules adopted outside the documents' rule-making power, applied with confidence and struck down at the threshold.
8. Terminating a manager before reading the management agreement. The resolution is passed publicly, then the notice period and termination payment are discovered. The community funds the error.
9. Control handed over without the records. No reconciled ledger, no asset register, no warranty assignments, no reserve study. The new board inherits liabilities it cannot quantify and claims it cannot prove.
10. Working an Abu Dhabi file from the pre-2025 position. Documents naming an owners' union, and an assumption that the developer alone controls whether and how the owners' body is formed.

Frequently asked questions