From: Visitor Wayne Waddleford
To: editor@bccondos.ca
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 11:21 PM
Subject: Leaky condo questions
Dear Ed,
Your website is so detailed. I like it very much.
I was once a tenant at 7051 Blundell Road. I used to live there several years ago. It is so sad that the old apartment had the leaking problem again. In 1994, my previous landlord told me that he had paid the management around CAD$3,0000 in repairs.
I'm now thinking of buying a five-year-old condo. There is something I need to ask. I hope you can give me some opinions.
Do highrise have the leaking problems, too ?
Will the condo leak again after the repair?
Or, is there is no guarantee the condo will not leak again after repair?
If the condo was leaking, and the mold wasn't removed properly or completely, what's the risk of harm?
How might buyers determine a condo's leak history? Is there, for instance, a public authority tracking either leakers or their experimental repair efforts? I know that strata corporations are required to keep certain records pertaining to the complex's construction, ownership and maintenance for several years. How do I know the history before record-keeping begins?
Thank you very much.
From: editor
To: Visitor Waddles
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: Leaky condo questions
Hi Waddles,
Use the material collected at Maintenance and Inspections at our Condo Life Cycles forum as a checklist to assess the risk of building failure at each condo complex of interest. What you're looking for is a fully-documented close relationship between the building designer/developer and subsequent purchasers (strata council representing owners). Has the building designer indeed provided council with a quality maintenance manual and - just as important - has strata corporation demonstrated in all relevant documents full compliance with the plan? What's the next big expense anticipated and what steps has the corporation taken to raise funds? How solid is the corporation's record in creating and enforcing bylaws? If one or more of the bylaws are unreasonable, in your view, how difficult would it be (how many votes required) to overturn them?
Any gaps in the strata records or the relationship between building designer/developer wildly increase the risk of building failure and the possibility of heavy repair/litigation expenses and should therefore factor into price accordingly. Pay no attention to real estate boosterism practised here shamelessly by corporate media parading as journalism. Reality is that people are getting stuck EVERY DAY with leakers of every age and NO, there is still NO PUBLIC AUTHORITY tracking either leaky condos or what are consequently the repair experiments, which are obviously equally risky.
More on a few CMHC case studies of repairs with mixed results listed at our Condo Links forum. Note that the case studies include examples of both low- and highrise repairs. Yup, highrises leak, too. It takes longer to show but the results may be even more devastating, according to a report from the late '90s. (See Leaky Condos, Why the Technology Didn’t Work by David Ricketts, P. Eng. at RDH Group, in the March, 1999 issue of Innovation). You can see a few examples of leaky highrises in photos at our Under Tarps forum.
See Oak Street, Vancouver's Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
The word about toxic mold is that litigation in that area of law is expanding and for exactly the reasons you describe. Go to our Toxic Mold forum and click on a few of the 'moisture problem' links listed along with notice of an upcoming legal seminar on mold Feb. 13/08. As you can see from the seminar, top dog attorneys representing the construction industry are putting their heads together to come up with ways to limit their clients' liability for the injury their shoddy, thoughtless work causes subsequent purchaser you. And with no penalty for creating the conditions that cause toxic mold, building practices are unlikely to change. Business as usual in the 'red-hot' real estate market, in other words.
Our three-part solution to the leaky condo debacle
Frankly, until we see:
- changes to condo governance legislation guiding strata councils in the how-tos of this unique type of corporate management while at the same time increasing exponentially the strata council's duty of care to the corporation to implement those guidelines
AND
- a fully transparent leaky condo/leaky condo repair experiment tracking process
AND
- very real penalties for building designers/developers who force subsequent purchasers to go to court for reimbursement of repair costs because they failed to follow the performance of their miserable work and to react to problems in a timely manner,
we are hard-pressed to recommend condo ownership in this province.
Quite simply, leakers are bad for the economy AND the environment AND they make us very, very sick at astonishing rates. We cannot understand why the provincial government continues to facilitate their proliferation. We call it B.C.'s new failed housing economy - Finance Minister Carole Taylor's trade-off of consumers in favor of the real estate pump and grind.
Hope that answers your questions. Good luck with the market. You'll need it.
Ed.
