Meet Alma

The OC assistant that's actually read the Owners Corporations Act 2006.

Alma lives inside Outlook as a side panel. Ask it a strata question, or open an owner's email and get a draft reply, both grounded in Victoria's Owners Corporation legislation, your firm's SOPs, and that building's history. Answers and drafts in seconds. You review and send. Alma never does.

Outlook
Water damage in my ceiling. Who is responsible?
Margaret Chen Lot 12, 8 Alma Road · to you

Hi,

There's water staining spreading across my bedroom ceiling and it's getting worse after last week's rain. A plumber inspected and said it's coming from the common property roof, not anything inside my lot.

Can you confirm the Owners Corporation will arrange the repair? It's been three weeks now.

Regards,
Margaret

A mockup of Microsoft Outlook showing an owner's maintenance email beside Alma's drafted reply, which cites section 46 of the Owners Corporations Act 2006 (Vic).
Grounded in
  • Owners Corporations Act 2006
  • Owners Corporations Regulations 2018
  • Subdivision Act 1988
  • Water Act 1989
  • Building Act 1993
  • Residential Tenancies Act 1997
  • Fences Act 1968
  • Sale of Land Act 1962
  • Privacy Act 1988 (APP 8)
  • The plan of subdivision
  • Schedule of liability & entitlement
  • VCAT · Owners Corporations List
  • Your firm's SOPs
  • Each building's history

The inbox isn't admin. It's where firms lose buildings and the managers who hold them.

$200k–$300k of recurring fee revenue rides on a single manager's desk: the 700–1,000 lots one person carries.
60–80% of a manager's day goes to owner communication. The inbox is the bottleneck.
$39k–$195k to replace a manager who burns out, and workload, not pay, is the top reason they leave.

Communication is the number-one reason committees switch managers, and the number-one reason managers walk. It's the same workflow. Alma is the one tool that defends both your buildings and your people, in the place the work already happens.

Sources

UNSW City Futures / SCA Australian Strata Insights 2024; MRI Voice of the Strata Manager; manager desk size & replacement cost triangulated from current Victorian role data and industry best-practice targets.

Alma drafts. It advises. You decide.

Open an owner's email in Outlook. Alma's side panel surfaces a draft reply, referencing the relevant sections of the Owners Corporations Act 2006, drawing on your firm's own procedures, and pulling context from that building's file. And when you just need an answer, like what the Act says about recovering overdue levies or who carries the cost of a common-property repair, ask Alma directly and get a cited answer without leaving Outlook. Edit it, approve it, or discard it. No email leaves your firm without a human reviewing it first.

1

Open the email

An owner writes in. You open their message in Outlook, like always.

2

Alma drafts

The side panel returns a reply grounded in the Act, your SOPs, and that building's history.

3

You review & send

Edit, approve, or discard. You send it from Outlook. Alma never sends on your behalf.

Clear your morning in one pass

Sit down to a morning of replies already drafted, not a wall of unread to start from scratch.

The most expensive hours in a strata firm are the ones lost to the morning inbox. A manager can burn two hours before lunch working through unread owner emails one at a time. Alma's triage closes that gap. Point it at your unread and it drafts a grounded, cited reply to every one in a single pass, so you arrive to a screen of finished drafts instead of a blank one.

You read, edit, and approve, exactly the way you would review the work of a senior assistant who already knows the Act, your firm's procedures, and every building's file. The morning that used to leak into the afternoon is cleared within the hour, and your judgment still sits on every reply.

Inbox Draft all unread
Unread this morning 8 drafted in one pass
R. Tran Fee notice — can I pay in instalments? Drafted
M. Singh Visitor parking — what do the rules allow? Drafted
T. Becker Access to Lot 4 for the balcony waterproofing repair Drafted
S. Patel Re: Lot 12 levy arrears — letter of demand Drafted
L. Romano Noise from short-stay guests in Lot 9 Drafting
Alma
Reply Ask Building
Replying to

Noise from short-stay guests in Lot 9

Owners Corporation
9 Marine Parade OC

Alma is drafting…

Finding the right section.

Voice profile
Senior manager voice

Alma never sends. You review and send every reply.

Region: ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) · no-training

Every draft cites the Act, your SOPs, and the building file. You review and send. Alma never sends.

Alma's morning triage: a list of unread owner emails, each marked “Drafted” after Alma generated a grounded reply, shown beside the Alma side panel drafting the active email about noise from short-stay guests, with the manager reviewing before sending.

Where Alma works

It lives in the side panel of the inbox you already use.

Alma installs as an Outlook add-in: one button on your ribbon, “Draft reply with Alma.” Open an owner's email and the panel opens beside it: choose the building, generate a grounded draft, edit it, and insert it straight into your reply. Nothing new to log into, no copy-paste between tabs, and it never sends.

You can also use Alma on its own, separate from Outlook. Open it in your browser, paste in an email or just ask it a question, and it gives you the same grounded answer or draft back. Handy for a quick check between meetings, drafting something from scratch, or any manager or staff member who does not work out of Outlook at all.

Runs in Outlook · Windows & Mac Outlook on the web Standalone in your browser Other providers on request
Outlook Draft reply with Alma
Alma

Drafts a Victorian Owners Corporation reply. You review and send.

Replying to

My fee notice arrived. What if I can't pay it all right now?

Owners Corporation
8 Alma Road OC
Draft reply Review before sending

Dear Mr Tran,

Thank you for getting in touch. If paying the full amount by the due date isn't possible, you're entitled to request a payment plan. The fee notice sets out this option, along with National Debt Helpline details.

The Owners Corporation can recover unpaid fees as a debt under section 30 of the Owners Corporations Act 2006 (Vic)Recovery of money owed to the OC, and may charge penalty interest on the arrears under section 29Penalty interest on arrears. Our firm's first step is always to agree a hardship arrangement where we can.

Citations

OC Act 2006 · s 30 OC Act 2006 · s 29 Firm SOP · Hardship Building file · 8 Alma Road

Alma never sends. You review and send every reply.

Region: ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) · no-training

Alma's Outlook task pane showing a lot owner's hardship query about a fee notice, with a generated reply that cites section 30 and section 29 of the Owners Corporations Act 2006 (Vic), the firm's hardship SOP, and the building file.

Built for Victoria

Built for Victorian strata. Not strata in general.

Most AI tools treat "strata" as a generic category. Alma was built by someone who has managed Owners Corporations across Victoria: OC rules amendments, special resolutions, committee delegations, the Act's specific obligations to lot owners. In Victoria it's an Owners Corporation with rules, not a "body corporate" with "by-laws," the way a generic tool would have it. Alma uses the language the Act actually uses, and it knows where the liability lives because the person who built it has stood in that liability.

The state of Victoria, Australia — Alma is built and based in Melbourne Melbourne
Built and based in Melbourne. Serving Victorian Owners Corporation firms statewide.

The whole framework, not one Act

Knowing the Act isn't enough. You have to read the plan.

Half the questions that land in your inbox don't turn on the Act at all. They turn on the registered plan of subdivision, the boundary plans, and the schedule of liability and entitlement for that scheme. Alma works across the whole framework you operate in, so a common-property call doesn't come back answered as if the Act were the only document on the file.

Owners Corporations Act 2006

The day-to-day (fees, meetings, resolutions, rules) and the repair-and-maintain duty, cited to the section a levy or dispute reply actually needs.

Subdivision Act 1988 & the plan of subdivision

Where the common-property boundary sits, and how lot liability and entitlement were struck for the scheme. The Act won't tell you who's responsible. The plan will.

Owners Corporations Regulations 2018

The model rules, maintenance-plan content, and the insurance requirements that sit under the Act.

VCAT · Owners Corporations List

How fee recovery and disputes are actually run, and the procedural traps that get a claim adjourned or struck out.

Training & oversight

It doesn't just save time. It raises the standard of every reply that leaves your firm.

The real cost in a strata firm isn't only the hours. It's the mistakes, and the senior time spent catching them. A newer manager's reply to a levy dispute or a common-property question can miss the section that matters, so a principal ends up re-reading and editing half the team's outbound mail. Alma changes that maths: every draft starts grounded in the Act, the regulations, the plan and the building file, so the floor comes up, and oversight stops being a full-time job.

New managers reply like seasoned ones

A first-year manager's draft already cites the right section and follows your firm's own SOPs. It's on-the-job training that ships with every email, not a course they sit once and forget.

Seniors stop re-checking every reply

When the baseline is grounded and consistent, principals and senior managers reclaim the hours lost reviewing and correcting other people's mail, and put them back into the complex matters only they can handle.

Mistakes are caught before they're sent

Every draft is anchored in the Act, the regs, and that building's history, so the error that becomes a VCAT headache or an angry committee surfaces at draft stage, not after it's left the building.

You still review and send every reply. Alma just makes sure what lands on your desk to review is already right.

Sounds like your firm

It writes the way your firm writes, not like a robot.

Choose your best manager, the one whose emails you would happily put the firm's name to, and during onboarding Alma is set up to write in their house style, drawn from their own sent items. From then on every draft, from every manager, lands in that one voice. The grounding makes the answer correct. The voice makes it yours.

Your voice, your judgment, your firm's name on every reply. What lands in front of you already sounds like it came from you.

Choose the voice that represents you

You decide whose voice becomes the firm's. Point Alma at your best manager's sent items and it is configured during onboarding to match their tone, structure, and the way they phrase the difficult conversations. No style guide to write, no prompting to figure out.

One firm voice across every manager

Your owners get a reply that reads the same whether it is sent on a Monday morning or a Friday night, by this manager or that one. The register stays steady, so your correspondence has one recognisable voice instead of a different tone in every inbox.

More than one voice, when the reader changes

One firm voice is the default, but you are not locked to it. Set up a second or third if you want — a warmer one for owners and a firmer one for a lawyer or a contractor on a recovery matter — and Alma matches the right register to whoever is receiving the reply.

Privacy & data residency

Built for Australian data storage and privacy.

Most AI tools send your data to vendor servers on the other side of the world. Alma is built differently. Your owner records, building files, and emails are stored in Australia, and AI processing runs on AWS infrastructure within Australia, never on overseas servers, supporting your obligations under Australian privacy law.

  • Anthropic never sees your data. On AWS Bedrock the model runs inside AWS's own infrastructure. Anthropic has no access to your prompts, your data, or the drafted replies.
  • Data residency by design. Your owner records and building files are stored in Australia. AI processing runs on AWS infrastructure within Australia, never on overseas servers, supporting your obligations under Australian Privacy Principle 8.
  • Never used to train any AI model. Not by AWS, not by Anthropic. Training on your data is contractually prohibited on Bedrock.
  • Data is deleted after 30 days. The questions you ask and the drafts Alma writes are retained for a maximum of 30 days, then permanently deleted. Alma is not your record-keeping system. Your official records remain in your own environment under the Owners Corporations Act.
  • Encrypted in transit and at rest. Everything Alma processes is encrypted the whole time it's with us, both in transit and at rest, not just while it's moving.

You handle sensitive financial and property data on behalf of lot owners. We built accordingly.

Daniel, founder of Alma

Built by someone who's sat in your chair.

Daniel managed Owners Corporations in Victoria before building Alma. He knows how long a levy-dispute reply takes when you need to cite the Act correctly, and how much of a manager's day disappears into email a junior couldn't safely touch. He's spent years inside the Victorian strata industry and stays close to the people who run firms like yours. Alma is the tool he wanted and couldn't find.

See Alma on your firm's emails

Tell us about your firm and we'll set up a walkthrough on your own correspondence, inside the Outlook you already use. No switching systems, and your details are handled in line with our Privacy Policy.

Victorian strata firms only. Your data is never shared.