What A Strata Should Budget For Outside

Strata corporations in British Columbia with five or more lots are required to obtain a depreciation report on a five-year cycle, projecting the repair, maintenance and renewal of common property across a thirty-year horizon. The Province publishes the requirements and the guidance, and the option to defer by annual three-quarter vote is no longer available.

That has pushed a lot of councils into looking properly at the exterior for the first time. The report tells you the roof has a remaining life and what replacing it will cost. What it is generally not written to tell you is how much of that remaining life depends on work nobody has scheduled.

It helps to separate them, because they behave differently and they are funded differently.

• Renewal — the roof, the membrane, the paint cycle, the asphalt. Large, infrequent, forecastable, and the thing the depreciation report exists to model.
• Recurring maintenance — gutters, roof moss, drains, common-area glass, hard surfaces, seasonal clearing. Small individually, annual or better, and the thing that decides whether the renewal line arrives on schedule or early.

A council that funds the first and skips the second is not saving money. It is moving a large number forward in time, and the depreciation report will duly capture that movement at the next five-year cycle.

Not an exhaustive list, and the mix changes with the building. But most sites in this region have some version of all of it:

• Gutters and downspouts, cleared and flow-tested. On a treed site this is twice a year rather than once, and the second visit is the one that gets cut first and matters most.
• Roof moss, treated rather than stripped. This is the single line with the clearest link to the renewal date of the largest asset on the site.
• Perimeter and site drains, checked before the wet season rather than during it.
• Common-area glass — lobby, corridor, amenity room. Frequency is a presentation decision more than a building one, which is why it belongs in a schedule rather than in a phone call.
• Hard surfaces: walkways, entrance aprons, visitor parking and the parkade deck. Moss on a walkway is a slip claim waiting for the right morning.
• Winter clearing and salting, with the trigger and the responsibility agreed before the season.

Three things, consistently.

The first is the second gutter clean. A treed site fills again between late October and December, and a single autumn visit booked for early October is a site with full gutters through the wettest eight weeks of the year.

The second is anything that requires access equipment. Work that needs a lift or rope access gets deferred not because it is unimportant but because it needs a decision at council rather than a phone call from the manager — so it waits for a meeting, and then for the next one.

The third is the record. A strata that has the work done and does not keep a log of what was done and when is a strata that cannot demonstrate a maintenance standard when it needs to — to an insurer, to a purchaser's lawyer, or in a dispute with an owner.

Most exterior quotes to stratas are not comparable, because they are not scoped the same way. Four things make them comparable:

1. 01State the frequency, not just the work. Twice-yearly gutters and annual gutters are different products at different prices, and a quote that omits frequency is quoting one visit.
2. 02State what is included at the boundary. Downspouts, guard removal, debris disposal, and whether the drains at the bottom are anyone's job.
3. 03State the access method. Ladder, pole, lift or rope changes the price more than the surface area does, and a quote silent on it has assumed the cheapest one.
4. 04Require a written record per visit. Date, areas covered, anything found. This costs a contractor nothing and is the only part of the whole arrangement that has value years later.

Does the depreciation report cover exterior cleaning?

It is written around common property renewal — roofs, envelope, paving, membranes — rather than around recurring cleaning. The two are connected, though: the assumed remaining life of a roof or a hard surface generally presumes it is being maintained, and a council reading the report is entitled to ask what that assumption depends on.

How often should strata gutters be cleared?

It is set by tree cover rather than by the calendar. A site with mature conifers overhanging the roofline usually needs two visits, weighted so the second falls after the bulk of the drop rather than in the middle of it. An open site with no overhang can often hold at one.

Who decides — the council, the manager, or the contractor?

The council owns the decision and the budget. The value a contractor adds is telling you what the building in front of them actually needs, including where the answer is less than you were expecting. A scope that never shrinks is a sales document.

Is a multi-year agreement worth it?

The practical argument for one is scheduling rather than price: work that is booked in advance happens in the right week, and exterior work in this region has narrow right weeks. Terms vary and should be settled in the agreement itself rather than assumed from an article.

What should we keep on file?

The scope, the frequency, the access method, and a dated record of each visit with anything found noted on it. That file is the evidence of a maintenance standard, and it is worth more at the point of an insurance question or a sale than it costs to keep.

Common areas, back-of-house and scheduled cycles are on the commercial cleaning page. The two lines with the clearest link to renewal dates are gutter cleaning and roof moss treatment.