The condition of the asset itself — repairs that stall, hazards in older buildings, what sits under the lawn, and the agreements councils sign without reading.
Governance decides who pays. This section is about the building the decision is actually about — and about the obligations that attach to a strata corporation the moment it becomes responsible for a physical asset rather than a set of bylaws.
Three ideas run through most of it. Deferral is not free. A repair postponed for a year is rarely the same repair a year later, and the buildings that spend least over two decades are the ones that decide fastest, not the ones that decide least. Older buildings carry obligations newer ones do not — a pre-1990 complex needs a hazardous materials survey before anyone opens a wall, and a council that has never commissioned one is relying on luck rather than on records. The strata is the owner of a workplace, which means that every time a contractor is on site there are duties running in both directions: information from the strata about what is in the walls, and clearance, insurance and a named prime contractor coming back the other way.
The articles below cover the workflow that stops repairs stalling, asbestos in older stock, the statutory rights of way that mean a utility can lawfully remove the hedge you just paid for, pest management under BC's tightened rodenticide rules, building security that works better than cameras, emergency preparedness before it is needed, and the telecom access agreements that arrive looking like a formality and turn out to be a twenty-year charge on your common property.
None of it is glamorous, and most of it is cheaper done early. That is the whole argument.
The free fibre upgrade arrives with an access agreement that grants a commercial party a decades-long interest in your common property. Council probably cannot sign it.
9 min read
Pests ignore the boundary between a strata lot and common property, which is why the question of who pays and the question of how to treat it have different answers.
9 min read
Repairs do not stall because councils are lazy. They stall because nothing in the system forces the next step to happen. Here is a workflow that does.
9 min read
Most strata security problems are solved by access control, lighting and sightlines, not by cameras. Cameras record what happened; the cheap measures stop it happening.
9 min read
Nothing on your strata plan is decorative, and the hatched corridors nobody asks about are usually the ones that end up costing a building real money.
9 min read
If your building went up before 1990, assume asbestos is present until a qualified person says otherwise. That one assumption prevents nearly every problem that follows.
9 min read
The most expensive emergencies in BC strata buildings are ordinary failures made worse by nobody knowing what to do in the first twenty minutes. Fix that in advance.
9 min read
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