Commercial & Industrial

A different rhythm from residential

A commercial or industrial strata runs on business hours and business consequences. When a shared loading bay is blocked or a three-phase supply goes down, someone's revenue stops — which changes both the urgency of a repair and the tone of the conversation about who pays for it.

The governing law is the same Strata Property Act, but almost everything practical about the corporation is different: the owners are companies, many units are tenanted by operators who are not the owner, and the common property is yard, dock, parking, signage and servicing rather than lobbies and gardens.

What we manage

Shared operational areas are the recurring flashpoint. Loading zones, turning space, visitor and staff parking, and yard storage are finite, and one owner's growth is usually another owner's obstruction. This is bylaw work as much as maintenance work, and it goes better when the rules are enforced consistently from the start rather than after a year of informal complaints.

Specialised servicing — three-phase power, compressed air, floor drains and interceptors, overhead doors, sprinkler systems rated for the stored contents — needs contractors who work on this kind of building. So does the paperwork behind it, particularly where an environmental or fire-code obligation attaches to what a unit is used for.

Tenant coordination is the piece residential management does not prepare you for. Bylaws bind occupants as well as owners, but the notice chain runs through the owner, and a complaint about a tenant's operation lands on the owner's file. Keeping an accurate registry of who occupies what, and routing correspondence correctly, prevents most of the disputes that otherwise end up at the Civil Resolution Tribunal.

Sections are common here, because retail, office and industrial owners rarely want to fund each other's priorities. Where a corporation is sectioned, each section needs its own budget, its own accounting and its own meetings, kept genuinely separate rather than nominally so.

Underneath it all is the same discipline as any strata we manage: segregated trust accounting, monthly reconciliation, a contingency reserve tracked against a depreciation report, and reporting a council of business owners can actually audit.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Strata Property Act apply to commercial stratas? Yes. Commercial and industrial strata corporations are governed by the same Act, with the same requirements for budgets, meetings, records and reserves.

Can our building be split into sections? It can where the different types of use justify it, and many mixed commercial buildings are. Creating or amending sections is a formal process with voting thresholds — worth doing properly.

Who deals with a tenant who is breaching a bylaw? The corporation enforces against the strata lot, so notice runs to the owner, who is responsible for their tenant's compliance. We handle the correspondence on both sides so nothing is missed.