France Publishes Every Registered Building's Manager. Croatia Started in December. New South Wales Stopped in May.
Ten jurisdictions we checked publish the link between a building and the company that manages it. New South Wales did too, until 26 May.
What changed here
On or about 26 May 2026, two fields left the publicly accessible NSW strata register: the name and licence number of each scheme's managing agent, and the date of each scheme's last annual general meeting. Both had been open — no login, no fee — for roughly four years. We wrote about what that means for the register itself last week.
This piece asks a narrower question, and one we had not seen anyone put: what does everyone else do?
We went and looked.
France has published it for a decade
France's Registre national d'immatriculation des copropriétés was created by the ALUR law in 2014. It records each copropriété — the closest French equivalent of an owners corporation — together with the identification of its syndic, the managing agent. The data sits on data.gouv.fr under Licence Ouverte 2.0, which expressly permits commercial reuse, as a free bulk download and an open API. Since April 2026 it refreshes automatically, every day.
It is not a perfect register, and the French Government says so plainly. Registration is declarative, with no post-submission control. Around 541,900 copropriétés are listed, and the official estimate puts coverage at roughly two-thirds of the national stock.
That caveat is the point rather than an exception to it. France has run an openly licensed, daily-refreshed, building-level manager register for more than ten years, with known and publicly acknowledged gaps, and has not treated the gaps as a reason to withdraw it.
Croatia opened its register five months before ours closed
On 11 December 2025, Croatia's State Geodetic Administration opened two registers to the public: the Registar zajednica suvlasnika, covering communities of co-owners, and the Registar upravitelja zgrada, covering building managers. Both were established under the Law on the Management and Maintenance of Buildings, NN 152/24, as amended by NN 47/26. Anyone can search them through the OSS Uređena zemlja portal using a cadastral parcel number, a cadastral municipality, or simply the building's street address. A manager must be on the register before a community of co-owners can be registered at all.
Hold that date next to the other one. Croatia's registers opened to the public five and a half months before the equivalent fields closed in New South Wales.
This is a settled norm, not a frontier
The two above are not early movers. Scotland's Property Factor Register has required factors to declare the properties they manage since 2011. Hong Kong has published licensed property management companies against the properties they manage since 2016. Belgium has required every association of co-owners to register its syndic mandate in the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises since 1 April 2017 — though a substantial share of Belgian associations still carry no recorded mandate, which is worth stating rather than glossing. Norway, Denmark, Singapore, South Korea and Hawaii each publish their own version of the same link.
Ten jurisdictions. Several of them operating under the GDPR, which is the strictest privacy regime any of these registers has to satisfy.
The reasoning is already on the New South Wales record
In June 2025 the Minister for Better Regulation and Fair Trading asked the NSW Productivity and Equality Commission to examine the strata commissions market. The Commission reported on 27 February 2026. At page 71 it states: "Most of the benefits will arise from improved market efficiency driven by increased competition." Its quantified benefits line is more specific again: "Greater transparency and comparability drives increased market efficiency and a modest reduction in strata manager and broker fees."
Transparency and comparability sit at the head of the Commission's own causal chain. That is not our framing of the argument — it is the Government's own analysis of it, delivered three months before the fields came down.
The two decisions were almost certainly unconnected. They sit in different parts of the system and there is no reason to think one knew about the other. That is precisely what makes the sequence worth noticing.
What a closed register looks like from outside
Of the 88,210 active schemes in our copy of the NSW register, 76,319 — 86.5 per cent — were last observed in May 2026. Another 11,649 date from January. Just 242, a little over a quarter of one per cent, have been seen since.
That is the shape of it. Not a gap that widens gradually, but a snapshot that stops.
Every jurisdiction named above has had to decide what the public may see about a licensed business and the buildings it holds. Ten of them decided one way. So did New South Wales, for four years.
About UNDA Management
UNDA Management provides market intelligence for strata managers — 89,000+ NSW schemes mapped, every manager linked, every contract cycle tracked. Our sister product, UNDA Development, provides precedent intelligence for property developers and property planning consultants. Learn more at unda.management
