Schemes

A scheme is a sectional-title development — a block of flats, a townhouse complex, an estate — the thing the Sectional Titles Act calls a scheme. It is the grouping that sits above the unit.

What a scheme carries

The things that are true of the whole development rather than of any one unit: the name, the street address, and the body corporate that runs it.

Units inside a scheme share that context but not their ownership. Flat 3 and Flat 12 may have entirely different owners, and usually do.

Scheme or freehold?

Every unit is one or the other, and the answer changes what Domi Vera asks you for.

	Sectional title	Freehold
Belongs to a scheme	Yes	No
Address	The scheme’s	Its own
Body corporate	Yes	No
Levies	Yes — see levies	No

A standalone house is freehold: it carries its own address and belongs to no scheme. A flat is sectional title: it takes the scheme’s address and its owner pays levies to the body corporate.

The system enforces this rather than trusting it. A sectional-title unit must name a scheme, and a freehold unit must carry its own address and no scheme. You cannot half-fill either shape.

Why it is not just a folder

It would be easy to think of a scheme as a way of grouping units in a list. It is more than that, because two things hang off it.

Levies. A body corporate invoices the scheme, and those costs have to land on the right units. Levies explains the reconciliation.

Shared context. When one thing is true of every unit in the development — the address, the managing agent’s reference, the body corporate’s name — recording it once on the scheme is what stops twenty units drifting apart.

One owner, several units

An owner who holds four flats in the same scheme has four units, each with its own books. The scheme is what they have in common; it is not what they are billed through. See units for why the unit, not the scheme, is where the money is anchored.