Don’t Fear Volunteering To Be On Your Board

The one piece of advice I have for all condominium owners – spend the time to participate on your board for at least one term. For most people, their house will be the largest part of their financial holdings in their life. Most people will never have more cash and securities than the value of their house. For condo owners, that house equity is directly impacted by how well your condominium, strata, or HOA is managed. Poorly managed condominiums could cost you a lot of extra money.

By being on the board you will get a special look, and insight, on where your fees and contributions go to. It also presents you the “other side of the story” for complaints brought against the corporation, or between condo neighbours. There’s nothing like the experience of dealing with all the different complaints and trying to resolve as many as possible of them gracefully.

Finally, you’ll likely realize that the condominium isn’t evil. It raises money against a budget, and most boards try to make sure each and every penny is used properly. By working with the budget you can see if your fees are well managed (they normally are – the majority of fees go to electric, water, natural gas, and insurance).

You don’t need to spend your life on the board – but you have chosen a living arrangement where you share some building costs and responsibilities with your neighbours. A year or two helping out with the condominium will be beneficial not only to you, but your financial understanding – and hopefully financial health – as well.

Storage Facilities as Condominium Developments

Building storage spaces as condominiums allows for a whole different approach to long term storage. In particular, a condominium approach allows for large scale storage.

You can certainly rent space from a commercial storage provider, but the space tends to be small – 50 sq feet or less. You can get larger space by actually leasing in a commercial park, but rental costs tend to be higher because the facility allows for businesses to operate, thereby requiring additional costs to maintain.

With a condominium based storage solution you can build only for storage, and build large. South of Sioux Falls they are trying out units large enough to hold touring busses, with a few units as large as 25×50 feet.

The development – Ultimate Space – indicates that the primary purchasers have been businesses to store inventory, but give a story of “the guy with too many cars” needing more space to tinker.

By buying the storage unit, you have a sense of predictable costs, control, the ability to upgrade or modify (within the limits of the bylaws) and a capital investment that may increase in value over time. As storage only units – the monthly condominium contribution should be relatively low as well.

Sounds like a great use of building under condominium governance and maximizing value to the purchasers.

Banning People with Criminal Records from Condominium Residence

I recently wrote that US Home Owner Associations wield an inordinate and improper amount of ability to pry into the private life of purchasers. Potential purchasers providing inch think stacks of documents to boards, just for the right to purchase a property, seems to becoming (sadly) the norm.

There is a wedge issue would that, if supported, allow Canadian condominium boards the same sort of access to purchaser (and ongoing access to owners) personal information – that condominiums can ban residency and board participation based on a criminal record. Being able to ban on a criminal record would allow boards to start intruding on personal privacy in order to enforce the ban.

Denise Lash of Heenan Blaikie closes in a recent article that –

It is time for condominium corporations to look at taking more extreme measures to ensure that the safety and security of residents is not compromised and put into place restrictions in condominium documentation.  Of course, the documentation will have to be carefully drafted to avoid any potential argument as to its enforceability.

This is a direct call to bring rights of intrusion to privacy into the hands of a board. We all have stories of our boards  with the  powers they currently have abusing privacy, position and status already. Adding additional fodder – and more significantly – responsibilities that are more prone to court challenges and civil suits is a recipe for disaster.

Most importantly, Ms. Lash takes singles out condominiums to go after because they offer an additional level of legislation and rules – the corporation bylaws – as a wedge to invade privacy. At a condominium’s heart is that it is housing. We wouldn’t be able to argue that a community association (single detached housing) could deny the right to residence in their community based on a criminal record – but we do for condominium only because there are additional levels of rules around the management of the shared or common property.

That’s what “extreme” and “carefully drafted to avoid any potential argument as to its enforceability” is all about – it’s the caution that what she suggests is a strong warping of the intention and scope of condominium legislation. I would say she suggests a perversion of condominium legislation and pushes in into a realm of social engineering.

Taking Things For Granted By Being In The Industry

In my role as President of CCI South Alberta, I sometimes get emails to answer. Recently I received an email from a person who is planning to move to Calgary and was concerned that there is no method of condominium contribution control in Alberta.

They sent me four MLS listings, for different units in the same complex, and they were aggravated that the contributions were wildly different between units (varying from $400 to $505/month). Indeed, the person expressed that condominium owners “need at much protection as tenants” to prevent abusive condominium fees.

It took me a few minutes to realize that the person was equating living in a condominium to renting, and that the condominium fee was looked at as rent. They also didn’t realize that on a square foot basis, the monthly contributions only varied by a maximum of 1.5 cents/sq. foot/month. There was no connection that a larger unit may pay more in condominium contributions.

Being in the industry it seems silly that a person equates contributions to rent, and that the size of your unit has an impact on the amount of the contribution. I guess I would call that having industry blinders.

What the letter really hit home with – that people in the condominium industry need to work a lot harder to explain, express, and defined the basic tenants of condominium to the general public. When we howl to the press about the issues of condominium we assume that people understand what we mean by the word condominium. But they don’t, and we cannot assume any more that they do understand. We need to do more work at a very fundamental awareness level to the general public. Only then will our issues be understood, and we will have a change to get the support we need from the general public in building a better condominium experience.