Weighted voting vs one-owner-one-vote in condominiums

Every condominium eventually runs into the same argument: should the person who owns the ground-floor studio have the same voice on the roof repair as the person who owns the two-floor penthouse? The answer is usually no — but with important exceptions.

The default: weighted voting

Almost every condominium law in Europe and the Americas defaults to weighted voting. Each unit carries a permillage — a thousandth share of the whole building — and votes are counted by permillage, not by headcount. The rationale is straightforward: costs are also split by permillage, so decisions that create costs should be authorised in proportion to how those costs will be borne.

Weighted voting also protects large owners from being outvoted by many small owners on decisions that hit them financially the hardest. And it protects small owners: they still get a seat and a voice; they just cannot force a €200k renovation onto a building where the majority of the value belongs to owners who do not want to pay for it.

When one-owner-one-vote makes sense

There are a handful of situations where headcount matters more than permillage:

• Electing the board or the community representative. These are personal-trust decisions; every owner has an equal stake.

• Purely social decisions like naming the building or approving a community charter — where fairness matters more than financial exposure.

• Setting the meeting date and format — logistical decisions that affect people equally.

Some jurisdictions require dual majorities for the biggest decisions: a majority of headcount *and* a majority of permillage. That prevents a single large owner from dictating outcomes and prevents a coalition of small owners from imposing costs on a large one.

The tooling problem

The reason many buildings default to headcount voting is not principle — it is that headcount is easy to count. Weighted voting requires a maintained register of every owner's permillage, a way to verify who is voting, and a tally engine that can add up thousandth shares.

Spreadsheets can technically do this. In practice they get out of date within a year: owners sell, permillages get recalculated after works, proxies come and go. The register drifts and the vote becomes unreliable — which is when boards give up and go back to counting heads.

CoCollab keeps the register live. When someone sells, the incoming owner is added with the exact permillage of the leaving one, and every future poll tallies correctly without anyone having to think about it. The dual majority — headcount and permillage — is available for the decisions that need it.

Which one to use for what

A rough rule of thumb, checked against your local law and your building's by-laws:

• Money decisions — always by permillage.

• People decisions — usually by headcount.

• By-law changes — dual majority, or unanimity where required.

• Everything else — permillage by default, headcount by exception.

The important thing is to decide *before* the vote opens. Nothing sours an AGM faster than arguing about how to count the votes after the votes have been cast.