Buying and selling a BC strata unit

The documents a buyer receives in a strata purchase contain nearly everything they need to know, and are structured almost perfectly to discourage anyone from reading them. A Form B Information Certificate is two pages of boxes. Two years of council minutes is a hundred pages of landscaping quotes with, somewhere in the middle, one paragraph about the building envelope that changes the whole picture.

These articles are about finding that paragraph. What a Form B tells you and what it deliberately doesn't, how Form B differs from Form F, what a depreciation report is signalling when its funding model shows a cliff in year seven, and the specific things worth checking before you remove subjects. There is also a piece on developer budgets in new construction, which are frequently optimistic in ways that show up as a fee increase in year two.

For investors there is a second layer: how rental ratios and rental history affect what you can do with the unit, and the genuine trade-offs between a large tower and a small self-contained complex. Both can be good buys. They fail in completely different ways, and the failure modes are worth knowing before you pick.