Taking Your Records Back From a Management Company

Management companies change. Councils change. The strata corporation's records are supposed to survive both. Yet the single most common reason a BC strata council finds itself unable to answer an owner's question, price a repair, or respond to a Civil Resolution Tribunal claim is that the files sat with a brokerage and came back incomplete.

Whether you are switching brokerages, moving to self-management, or just doing a tidy council handover, here is how to think about a strata records handover in British Columbia.

The records belong to the corporation

Under the Strata Property Act, it is the strata corporation — not the manager — that must prepare and retain records, and it is the strata corporation that must produce them on request. Section 36 requires the strata to make records available for inspection and provide copies to an owner, to a tenant assigned that right, or to a person either authorises in writing; former owners and former tenants may request records relating to their period of ownership or tenancy. The strata must comply within 2 weeks, except a request for the bylaws or rules, which must be met within one week (Strata Property Act s.36). The Regulation caps copying at 25 cents per page, and no fee may be charged for inspection by an owner, tenant or their authorised person (Strata Property Regulation s.4.2).

That obligation does not pause because the files are in a brokerage's basement. A manager holds the records on the corporation's behalf; the duty to produce them stays with the corporation. Practical consequence: the handover is not a courtesy, it is the condition of being able to comply.

Similarly, Information Certificates (Form B) and Certificates of Payment (Form F) must be issued within one week of a request (Strata Property Act s.59). A council that cannot find the current budget or the depreciation report cannot issue a complete Form B.

Questions councils actually ask

Does the management company have to hand over our records?
The records are the strata corporation's. How and when they are physically or electronically returned is generally governed by your management contract and by the brokerage's own regulatory obligations — so read the contract's termination and records clauses before you give notice, and put the handover expectations in writing.

Do we need an owners' vote to end a management contract?
It depends on how you end it. A strata management services contract may be cancelled without liability or penalty, despite anything in the contract to the contrary, by the strata corporation on 2 months' notice if the cancellation is first approved by a 3/4 vote at an annual or special general meeting, or by the other party on 2 months' notice. But the strata needs no prior approval to cancel the contract in accordance with its own terms, or to simply refuse to renew it when it expires (Strata Property Act s.39). A "3/4 vote" means at least 3/4 of the votes cast by eligible voters present in person or by proxy, excluding abstentions (s.1) — not 3/4 of all owners.

What about the original developer's management contract?
A contract entered into before the first annual general meeting ends on the earliest of four weeks after the second AGM, the contract's termination date, or a cancellation date under s.39 — and owners may continue it by majority vote at the second AGM (s.24). Newer corporations should also confirm the owner developer transferred control of the strata's money, keys and access devices to the elected council within one week after the first AGM (s.22).

Build the handover list from the retention rules

Regulation s.4.1 sets five different retention periods, which makes a useful checklist (Strata Property Regulation s.4.1):

• Permanently: the registered strata plan and amendments; resolutions dealing with changes to common property including limited common property designations; decisions of an arbitrator, judge or the CRT in proceedings the strata was party to, and legal opinions it obtained; depreciation reports; electrical planning reports; EV charging infrastructure reports.
• Until disposal or replacement: reports on repair or maintenance of major items (engineering, risk management, sanitation).
• At least 6 years: minutes of general and council meetings; books of account; budgets and financial statements; income tax returns; bank statements, cancelled cheques and certificates of deposit; Information Certificates; waivers and consents under ss.41, 44 and 45.
• At least 6 years after it ends: written contracts, including insurance policies.
• At least 2 years: correspondence.
• Current copy only: the bylaws and rules, the Act and regulations, the council list and the owner list.

Also confirm the money, not just the paper: contingency reserve fund balances must be accounted for separately from other strata money and invested as permitted (s.95), and any CRF loan to the operating fund has conditions and must be disclosed to owners (Regulation s.6.3).

What you can rebuild independently

If a gap turns up, some of the most important documents live at the Land Title Office, not with the manager. The registrar establishes a common property record for the strata corporation on deposit of the strata plan (s.252), and must note any freehold disposition of common property and any designation or removal of limited common property on it (Regulation s.14.14). Filed bylaw amendments are also registered there — a bylaw amendment has no effect until it is filed (s.128) — so your consolidated bylaws can be reconstructed from the registry if the office copy is stale.

Keep the knowledge where it belongs

Once the boxes and PDFs arrive, the work is making them findable. A searchable, indexed repository is what turns a records request into a two-minute task instead of a two-week scramble — see Document Management for Self-Managed Stratas for a practical filing structure, and Why Your Strata Needs an Owner Portal for giving owners self-serve access to what they are entitled to anyway. For large historical sets, tools like SearchStrata can run AI analysis across years of minutes and reports to surface what a council would otherwise never read, and How AI Helps Self-Managed Strata Councils covers where that help is and isn't reliable.

This is the principle behind ManageStrata: the management company can change, but the strata's knowledge shouldn't — the documents, minutes, votes and books belong to the corporation and stay put when a manager or a council turns over.

None of this is an argument for firing your property manager. A good brokerage is worth keeping. It is an argument for the corporation holding its own records in its own system, so that a transition — planned or not — is an administrative event rather than an institutional memory loss.

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.