What a strata document is really telling you

A condo is two purchases in one. There's the home you walk through — and there's the building it sits in, run by a strata whose decisions will shape your monthly costs and your resale for years. The first you can see. The second lives in a stack of documents most buyers skim and few actually read.

That paperwork is boring on purpose. It's also where the real story is. Here's what we look for.

The minutes: two years of the building's life

Council and general-meeting minutes are a running diary of what's gone wrong and what's coming. Read at least the last two years. You're hunting for recurring problems — the leak that keeps coming back, the elevator that's been 'under review' for eighteen months — and for the word that should always make you sit up: envelope.

The depreciation report: the thirty-year forecast

Most BC stratas now carry a depreciation report — an engineer's estimate of what the building's big components (roof, pipes, elevators, parkade membrane) will need over the next thirty years, and whether the money's there to pay for it. It's the single most useful document in the pile.

You're not reading it for the exact numbers. You're reading it for the gap: does the funding plan roughly match the coming repairs, or is there a cliff a few years out that today's owners are quietly hoping to sell before?

The contingency fund and the special levy

The Contingency Reserve Fund is the building's savings account. A healthy one absorbs a new roof without drama. A thin one means the cost of the next big project lands on owners directly, as a special levy — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, due on a deadline you don't control.

• A well-funded reserve and a boring set of minutes is worth paying a little more for.
• A rock-bottom strata fee can be a warning, not a saving — the building may simply be under-collecting.
• A recently passed special levy can actually be good news: someone else already paid to fix the thing.

Red flags that should slow you down

• Repeated water-ingress or leak entries across multiple units.
• A depreciation report the strata has voted to defer or ignore.
• A contingency fund that's tiny relative to the building's size and age.
• Bylaws that conflict with how you actually plan to live — rentals, pets, age restrictions.

None of these is automatically a deal-breaker. Every building has a history. But they change the number a place is worth, and they're exactly the kind of thing that should come up before you write, not after. Reading the documents is unglamorous work — which is precisely why it's part of ours.