Strata Maintenance Planning & Work Orders

Maintenance is where most strata disputes begin. Who fixes the balcony? Who pays when the city sends a notice? A written strata maintenance plan does not eliminate those questions, but it makes them answerable before they become a special levy argument at the AGM.

Who Repairs What: Start With the Bylaws and the Plan

Before you can plan maintenance, you need to know whose duty each item is. Under the Schedule of Standard Bylaws, Standard Bylaw 8 makes the strata corporation responsible for repairing and maintaining:

• common assets, and common property not designated as limited common property;
• limited common property, but only for repair and maintenance that in the ordinary course occurs less often than once a year — plus, no matter how often it occurs, the structure and exterior of a building, chimneys, stairs, balconies and other things attached to the exterior, exterior or common-property-facing doors, windows and skylights, and fences, railings and similar structures enclosing patios, balconies and yards;
• a strata lot in a plan that is not a bare land strata plan, restricted to that same list of structural and exterior items.

Standard Bylaw 2 puts the rest on the owner: an owner must repair and maintain their strata lot except where the bylaws make it the corporation's job, and an owner with the use of limited common property must maintain it subject to the same exception.

Two cautions. First, your registered bylaws may differ — many strata corporations have amended the repair-duty bylaws, and the amended version governs. Second, the division depends on what the strata plan actually shows. Whether a balcony, window or parking stall is strata lot, common property or limited common property is a question about your plan and your filed designations, not a question with one province-wide answer.

Building a Practical Strata Maintenance Plan

A maintenance plan is an operational document, not a statutory form. In practice, useful plans pull together:

• an asset inventory — roofs, envelope, decks, elevators, boilers, plumbing, parkade membrane, electrical service;
• cyclical tasks and frequencies, mapped to whoever owes the duty under your bylaws;
• funding, tied to the operating fund and contingency reserve fund; and
• major renewals, informed by the corporation's depreciation report.

The depreciation report is the natural spine of the plan. Reports are required for strata corporations of five or more lots, renew every five years, and are prepared by a qualified person — see BC Depreciation Report Requirements and, if your deadline has slipped past you, what happens if your strata misses it.

Electrical capacity now belongs in the same plan. Under s. 94.1 of the Strata Property Act, a strata corporation must obtain an electrical planning report from a qualified person by the date set in the Regulation. For non-phased plans, Regulation s. 5.8 sets December 31, 2026 where the land is wholly or partly in a specified area and December 31, 2028 where it is wholly outside one, with an exemption for plans that had fewer than five strata lots on December 31, 2023. Phased plans follow the separate timetable in Regulation s. 5.9. Who counts as a "qualified person" is defined in Regulation s. 5.10 and turns on whether every building in the plan is a Part 9 building. Details are in our electrical planning report guide.

Councils tracking dozens of assets, warranty dates and report renewals often keep the whole schedule in one place; that is exactly the kind of recordkeeping ManageStrata is built for. For making sense of a dense engineer's report or an older depreciation report, SearchStrata offers AI analysis of strata documents.

Strata Work Orders: Questions and Answers

Q: What is a strata work order?
A: A notice or order from a public or local authority authorized by law to require work — a municipal building or fire inspector, for example — directing that work be done on the property.

Q: The order names common property. Who complies?
A: The strata corporation. Under s. 83, the corporation must comply with a requirement to do work on or to common property, or land that is a common asset, where the order comes from an authority authorized by law and is given to the corporation.

Q: The strata received an order about work on a strata lot. What now?
A: Under s. 84, the corporation must promptly give that notice or order to the owner of the strata lot (subject to the exception in s. 46 of the Fire Safety Act). An owner who receives such an order — from the authority or from the corporation — must do the work.

Q: What if the owner does nothing?
A: Section 85 lets the strata corporation do the required work, and the owner must reimburse the corporation for what it spends. Two conditions matter: if the owner appeals the work order and advises the corporation in writing of the appeal, the corporation must wait for the results of the appeal; and except in an emergency, the corporation must notify the owner in writing of its intention to do the work at least one week before starting.

Getting Maintenance Items in Front of Owners

Major work usually needs an owners' vote, so agenda control matters. The council determines the agenda of an annual or special general meeting, but under s. 46, persons holding at least 20% of the strata corporation's votes may by written demand propose a resolution or raise a matter, which must then be included in the notice for the next general meeting and on that meeting's agenda. Which threshold applies to the spending itself — majority or 3/4 vote — depends on the fund and the purpose, so check the current provisions before drafting the resolution.

This article is general information about BC strata law, not legal advice; verify against the current Strata Property Act and Regulation or consult a BC strata lawyer.