Depreciation Reports - Choose the providing company wisely

Back in May I discussed my concerns regarding the lack of training and building science knowledge I feel most Strata Property Mangers posses.  At the end of the article I mentioned that Bill 8 of the Strata Property Act may be the solution we need in order to ensure Strata councils have the information they need to properly maintain their buildings in the future.

Well, it looks like this wish was a bit too premature as Bill 8 will not be the magic bullet I and many others were hoping for.  You see, Bill 8 does not limit who can provide the Depreciation Study and what qualifications they require.  You do not even need to be an engineer and there are now organizations and individuals clambering over each other to cash in on this new windfall.  One organization in particular has even gone so far as to create a new ‘certification’ (Reserve Fund Analysts – RRFA) targeted at its home inspectors to provide opportunities in this field of work.  This new direction was one of several factors that helped cement my decision to leave the organization.  It has become clear to me that it was no longer about “protecting the public” and was more about increasing membership and their ability to make money.

Depreciation studies are crucial planning tools for Strata that require input from many disciplines (engineers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc.), but specifically should be organized and presented by Professional Engineers with a focus on Building Science.  There is no way a home inspector should ever be providing this type of service.  They just do not have the right skill set and experience to do so and the limited number of courses that organizations are requiring their home or property inspectors to complete before becoming ‘certified’ just does not get them there.  If it did, the individual would have a P. Eng. and MASc designation and would be performing the Studies under these Professional designations and not a CPI or RRFA.

When choosing a firm to represent your Strata’s best interest, choose wisely.  I only recommend the best firms to my clients and advise that this is not an area to try to go cheap.  The information and maintenance instructions given out by firms like RDH, Morrison Hershfield, or Read Jones Christoffersen when completing their Depreciation Studies is well worth the investment and will usually save you money in the long run. 

Isn’t the financial future of your Strata worth hiring a Pro?

OtterBox Cell Phone Cases

Every so often you come across a product that actually does what it says it will do and OtterBox cell phone cases do just that.

As a home inspector, I often find myself squeezing through tight places and have quite regularly knocked my phone out of its case or just ripped the case of my belt.  The end result was often damage to my phone or my case.  When I upgraded to a Blackberry last fall I decided to invest in an OtterBox Defender case which cost me more than the phone but boy does it represent a good value when you look at how it and the company behind the case have performed.

My first of several close calls took place on a job site where I was volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.  I rubbed by a stud and dropped the phone down 1.5 stories.  That would have been sure death right?  But no, even though the phone was knocked out of its ‘holder’, the balance of the OtterBox rubber and rigid plastic wrapping kept the phone safe and secure.

Similar scenarios happened several times in the months ahead until one day I really did it.  While getting into my truck, the case caught on the doorframe and went ‘snap’.  The rivet holding the belt clip onto the holder had snapped into three pieces.  Now on previous cases I had purchased and performed a similar manoeuvre to similar outcomes, I had always been SOL with the retailer saying sorry ‘but’… 

I decided to contact OtterBox through their website and take a chance.

Miracle #1: They Responded – Quickly!

Miracle #2: They were willing to replace!

Miracle #3: I did not have to jump through hoops to get the replacement and it would cost me $0!

They asked I send them a photo of the damage and that I put next to the case in the photo a piece of paper with my Name and the Date.  That was it.  I submitted this info and a couple of hours later I get an email informing me my new case was on the way.  I received excellent and prompt support which is rare these days (Thank-you John).

In the last 6 months they have sent me 5 cases – What can I say, I am a big guy fitting through a lot of tiny spaces. And to provide full disclosure, one arrived broken and one was the wrong model.  But even these provided me with parts that I have been able to use to ‘repair’ my case from time to time.  Each time, the same thing, just send them an email with a photo and the new case was on its way with no grief.

The cases are extremely durable; I am just VERY HARD ON THEM.  For a normal person, these would probably last many years without any problems.  And even when you do rip them off your belt and they go bounding down to what ever hard surface greets them below – you phone will survive!

The OtterBox cell phone case is well worth the extra investment in my view!

Building Design - Is it missing building science?

Lunacy of 'Green Building' Design

A short discussion about the disconnect that exists in the architectural world from good building science. 

Are Strata Properties being properly Maintained?

I was reviewing the news storey regarding the Sussex Square residents’ dispute with their leaseholders Westsea Construction and Capital Construction Supplies. At the heart of this dispute is the fact that the buildings they live in have $10M worth of repairs required to a leaky building envelope.  The residents feel that they should not have to pay because in their opinion, the building was not adequately maintained (or designed and built, but I am going to concentrate on maintained), and it is this lack of maintenance that caused the building enclosure to fail.

Is this a valid argument?  I know that most home warranty programs have clauses stating that if you do not maintain your home and damage occurs due to the lack of maintenance, they will not cover you.  Is this case not the same thing?  The leaseholders had a responsibility for the maintenance of the buildings.  If it can be shown that the damage was a result due to the lack of maintenance, should they not be responsible for the repair?  Why should the residents (who are in this case acting as the ‘insurance funders’) have to pay for this work.

This leads me to another question.  Do most building managers have the skills to properly manage the maintenance of the buildings in their portfolio?  I do not believe so. 

Back in the 90’s the rules changed making it mandatory that all Strata managers become licensed by the Real Estate Council in BC.  This was a good step as it started to ensure that the public could expect a level playing field with all managers meeting a minimal level of training.  It also requires all managers to complete ongoing education in two year cycles. But is this enough? 

Looking through the initial training course, there is only 2 out of 25 chapters that deal with Buildings (building design and construction & controls, maintenance, and energy conservation).  The rest is administrative type topics (the paperwork portion of the job) or the CYA topics (the Law and ethics).  Only two weeks out of the suggested 25 weeks is dedicated to gaining knowledge that would allow you to properly manage the maintenance of the buildings.

Next looking at the list of approved ongoing education courses, not one of them deal with the maintenance of the building and in fact a majority of them deal with topics that the average manager will never need, like selling real estate, time shares, and marketing, topics suitable for Real Estate agents but probably not for property managers.

I have met a lot of building managers in my job.  The vast majority of them appear to have a good handle on the day to day administration portion of the job, but few have exhibited any significant degree of building knowledge and appear particularly ignorant to building enclosure science.  The goods ones are out there; during the 10 year period of time that I owned a Condo and was on the Strata, we worked with an excellent manager who did realize the importance of proactive maintenance and the savings achieved by spending a little bit more up front to do it right.  In fact, his practices had a lasting effect on how I approach maintenance and repairs to this day.  But unfortunately, he appears to be one of the few exceptions as opposed to the rule.

So if a Strata relies on a property manager for advice on maintaining their building stock, and the manager does not have the skills related to construction, building maintenance, or building enclosure science, what is the chances that the building will have the proper proactive maintenance performed?  

The one saving grace related to this discussion is that the new Bill 8 will require all Strata (unless they opt out) to perform professional engineering reviews of their Building Enclosure on a regular cycle.  This should gradually transform all Strata building stock into well maintained structures.

Maintenance Matters: Below-Grade Assemblies in Multi-Unit Residential Buildings

This Home Owner Protection video identifies the responsibility to maintain below grade assemblies.

A water leak is never a good thing.  If water is coming into your parkade or underground facilities, notify your Strata immediately.  Repairs should be performed ASAP as ongoing water movement can start to rust the embedded reinforcing concrete leading to much more costly repairs.

Annual inspections of your underground facilities should be performed annually and SENWI can assist in this matter.

Maintenance Matters: Exposed Wood Structures in Multi-Unit Residential Buildings

This Home Protection Office Video discusses the need for ongoing maintenance to exterior wood surfaces.

It is important to ensure that all wood surfaces remain well sealed with paint, stain, or sealer.  All surfaces should also be slopped so that water does not sit on their surfaces.  Annual inspections are recommended and SENWI can assist in this regard.

Communication is key when using contractors

While I may disagree with the volume of contractors that provide a less-than-ideal service and product, this article from Shell Busey is none-the-less great advise.

Paying too little for an inspection

I recently came across this quote by John Ruskin (1819-1900) and felt it really addressed the home inspection industry and the common consumer who shops by price alone.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

Maintenance Matters: Cladding in Multi-Unit Residential Buildings

This Home Protection Office video identifies the responsibility by Strata to maintain the cladding on the Strata's dwellings.  Pay particular attention to the warning against using pressure washers.

All cladding requires ongoing maintenance including regular cleaning (yearly or every two years), and resealing.

Yearly cladding inspections are recommended.  SENWI can provide assistance in this area.

Can you trust your repair person?

A CBC Marketplace investigation into the quality of work provided by typical repair people.  The results will infuriate you.

CBC Video

The problem with this storey is that the average home owner would never know they had been ripped off and so would not know to complain and this type of shabby work would continue over and over again.

Should agents make sure paperwork is in order when they list a Multi-Family Dwelling

SENWI inspects a lot of multi-family residences and we are becoming impatient with the general lack of transparency we are encountering by STRATA’s and their representatives (or in brand new buildings, by the developer) during the purchase process. SENWI feels that a purchaser is entitled to receive any and all information available on a given Strata complex, which would typically be available to the STRATA owners as a course of routine or on special request. This would include all minutes (Council and owner meetings), all engineering and mechanical reports, financial records, and any legal action by or against the STRATA. After all, the purchaser is technically now an owner with an accepted offer. That offer just happens to be based on the purchaser being satisfied with a due-diligence process.


Many good purchasers’ agents will include clauses in the purchase contract asking for these types of documents (unfortunately not all agents engage in this practice), but in our experience some of the documents (specifically the engineering and mechanical reports) are often not provided on a timely basis and sometimes not at all. For instance, our inspectors are regularly told that a building envelope report is not available for the STRATA’s we inspect. There are a very few occasions, once we have pressed the issue, that we find this to be the case and instead the problem often seems to be one of laziness or concealment.

It is SENWI’s opinion that the buying public needs to demand laws to better protect a purchaser in this Province. When a multi-family STRATA dwelling is offered for sale, there should be requirements in place to ensure the purchaser is provided access to all required and available documentation. This access should be expedient and not involve days of delay. In an age where hard drive space is cheap, there is no reason why all documents cannot be kept and forwarded in an electronic format at no cost within an hour or two of the request. There are also multiple economic options for electronic transport of large files including FTP sites if necessary. An even better option is to upload all of the STRATA’s documents to a secure website for owner access. Then a purchaser with an accepted offer could be provided login credentials to the website with full access to all of the documentation they need to make an informed and timely decision. Fortunately, the website concept is catching on with some of the larger STRATA’s in the city.

SO, if you are purchasing a multi-family, make sure your agent asks for these documents in  your offer and include an expedited time frame (at most 48 hours)  that you are to receive these documents.

Dollar Limit on Subject To Inspection Clauses

I have occasionally come across clients who have accepted an inspection subject clause wording that greatly reduces their ability to pull out of the purchase if they are not satisfied with the findings of the home inspection report.


This clause can be worded similar to:

“Inspection Report against any defects whose cumulative cost of repair exceeds $ entered dollar amount (often $1000) and which reasonably may adversely affect the property’s use or value. The Seller will allow access to this property for this purpose on reasonable notice.”

There are two problems associated with a clause similar to above.

The first problem is that there can be conditions or characteristics uncovered during the home inspection that man not have a high dollar value to address, or in some cases may not even have the ability to assign a dollar value to, but cause the dwelling to be undesirable in the eyes of the purchaser. One example is rodents in the attic. Many people are not comfortable with this style of defect even though the cost of remediation can be in the low hundreds of dollars. If you accept a subject clause limiting your ability to pull out only when deficiencies are over $1000, then if the rodents are the only found issue, you are stuck purchasing a home you are really not comfortable living in. Another example of a characteristic of a home that you may not be able to assign any value to, and that actually caused one of my clients to pull out of their purchase, had nothing to do with the dwelling itself but instead addressed a ‘green belt’ that ran behind the property. During my review with the client at the end of the inspection, I indicated that the ‘green belt’ was in fact being utilized as a dirt bike obstacle course and that the bike activity could be clearly heard inside the house with all doors and windows closed during much of the inspection. When this was reported to the wife, a decision was quickly made that this was not the property for them. They were not interested in their peaceful weekend mornings, drinking coffee on the porch, being interrupted by the howl of dirt bikes going by.

The second problem with this kind of limit being set is that it is difficult for the purchaser to prove a specific dollar value to remediate defects uncovered by the inspection. Often it is pretty clear that the defects are well over the subject limit, but without a quote, how can the buyer prove this. Inspectors are not contractors and cannot possibly provide accurate estimates for each and every defect uncovered. Many inspectors will not provide any estimate at all for remediation while others will try to provide some form of ballparks to the purchaser. So in order to comply with a clause like the above, the buyer would need to bring in contractors to provide fixed quotes on the various defects identified by the report. The subject removal period does not typically grant enough time for this type of activity and so extensions would have to be granted (often a week or more would need to be added).

You can see that neither condition is desirable for the purchaser. Even if it can be proven that the condition found is below the limit set by the clause, the buyer may not be comfortable living in a home with the condition even in a repaired state. Or the buyer may not have the time or facilities to deal with a repair and the delay it may represent to the ability to occupy the home. These are all decisions that should be left to the purchaser and not limited by an inspection clause.

We recommend that buyers not accept a dollar limit in their inspection subjects and instead insist on wording as close as possible to:

“Subject to the Buyer being satisfied with a property inspection to be performed, at the Buyer's expense, by a licensed Home Inspector of the Buyer’s choosing. Access to the property will be provided by the Vendor on reasonable notice and to the extent required to fulfill the Buyer’s due diligence”

The last part of this clause is important as we have occasionally come up against vendors who have refused to provide adequate access to the property. Because there agent (selling agent) has advised then that most inspections take 3 hours or less, they have initially refused access for our 4-8 hour process. The wording of this suggested clause also provides access to the property for secondary inspections that may be warranted based on the original findings of the home inspector.

Bottom line: As a buyer, you should not accept any wording that reduces your ability to legitimately pull out of the purchase should your home inspector uncover a deficiency or condition you are not comfortable accepting.

Agent admits it is not a good idea to choose an inspector that the agent recommends

Good Morning America interview a Real Estate Agent who confirm you may not be served by an agent refered inspector.


Good Morning America Video

Additional tips when purchasing a Condo

Some final points of advice when looking to purchase in a Multi-Family building


1) Like mentioned in the Vancouver Courier articles (Condo Pitfalls & Condo Nightmares) that inspired these blog entries, any lack of documentation is an automatic Red Flag! If the building is more than 4 years old, and does not have a extensive building envelope review completed in the last 5 years, you should think twice about continuing with the purchase.

Fortunately the lack of report should become a rarer situation going forward now that Bill 8 of the Strata Property Act has been enacted requiring all Strata’s in BC to commission a ’depreciation report’ within the next 2 years.

Note: On a side comment, it is important for Condo owners to realize that the implementation of these studies will most likely culminate in significant Strata Fee hikes as the full cost of maintaining a multi-family-building is better understood by Strata’s.

2) Never allow yourself to be pressured into a purchase. Subject removal dates are arbitrarily defined periods of time with no relation to a logical time period required to properly vet your purchase. They often can represent hype the agents impart into the process to make purchasers feel they need to ‘act fast’ or loose their buying opportunity. This is far too big of a decision, with far too large a potential liability, to be rushed into without due diligence. Take the time to due it right. If it falls through, it probably is for the best. Any vendor who is seriously interested in selling will ensure the buyer has ample time to vet the purchase as they do not want the buyer coming at them later. In markets where there is a buying frenzy, do not be pressured to buy without subjects, you are already buying at what is often the top of the market and can usually ill afford to take on the additional responsibility of unknown liability.

3) At the lower end of the liability scale is a fully rain-screened dwelling. In general, these buildings are more tolerable of faults in the design of the primary water shedding surface and will usually represent a much lower level of potential liability. At the upper end of the liability scale is a face-sealed stucco building without any significant overhangs and a complicated exterior design with lots of penetrations and architectural ‘features’. For a discussion on these two exterior styles see this HPO bulletin.

4) Remember that just because a building is not leaking now does not mean it will not leak down the road. There is a reason that a face sealed building is no longer allowed by code. It does not work! It is usually not a matter of if problems will develop but a matter of when. There is also the issue where many older buildings (pre-1990) are now looking at energy upgrades to the building to reduce the cost of heating bills as energy costs rise. This is often having a negative and unanticipated impact on the building’s health because as more and more of the interior heat is blocked from reaching the exterior sheathing and cladding, that wall assembly’s ability to survive infrequent wetting is substantially reduced. So as the general housing stock is updated to be more energy efficient, it will be increasing more important to ensure that the walls have a continuous water shedding capability.

I hope these entries have helped. I would be happy to discuss these issues further with you at any time. As some final guidance for you, when purchasing a Condo, I recommend you review this bulletin I send all my Condo clients as part of my inspection process.

What kind of inspection report should you insist on?

OK, I have advised that to try to lower your potential liability in buying into multi-family-dwellings as much as possible you need to:


1) Make sure you have the Condo inspected

2) Make sure you choose an inspector who takes the time to perform a thorough evaluation of not just the purchase unit, but also the building envelope/exterior, roof, parkade, and all common mechanical areas.

3) Most important of all, look for an inspector who’s ‘process’ includes a detailed review of all engineering reports commissioned by the Strata in the last 5-10 years.

I would like to now talk about the type of report the buyer should ensure their chosen inspector provides.

By far the most common form of report used by home inspectors North America wide is the ‘Check List’ report. This takes on many different flavours and can even be included in a fancy publication like the Home Reference Manual which looks impressive but at its core is only a 9 page check-list-format report. The rest of the binder is boiler plate text that may or may not be relevant for the home you are purchasing and often does not describe a given defect with enough information to be truly informative in my view.

The fundamental problem with checklist style reports is that they have been designed to be of as little effort as possible for the inspector to fill out while at the same time protecting the INSPECTOR from liability. They typically do not go out of their way to inform you the PURCHASER and ensure YOU are protected from liability. There is physically not enough room to do so on most of these styles of reports as they often have limited opportunity to add enough commentary to fully describe a defect or deficiency. Inspectors often like this style of report because it takes very little skill, thought, or time to fill them out. Because you do not have to explain the deficiency, you can rush through the home with the only purpose being of identifying what may be a problem on the checklist and then state ‘further evaluation recommended’. Now of course most purchasers follow that advice- right? The reality is that very few purchases take additional steps, beyond the home inspection, to determine the current condition of the dwelling.

The final fundamental problem with checklist style reports in my view is that they never contain photos. Photos are the single most important tool that a good inspector has of portraying information to their client. Yet for a majority of the industry, they are not part of an inspector’s process. How can they be? When the average inspector provides a carbon copy checklist report on site and then never sees the purchaser again, how can photos be included? The answer is they can’t and typically aren't. Those that do will often just provide the client with a memory card or CD/DVD of raw unedited photos with no commentary. There is also a whole segment (significant) of the inspection industry where the inspector is scared to provide photos. A regular topic of discussion on inspector forums and at association meetings is around the concept that an inspector could be found liable for a defect shown in a photo but not referenced in the inspectors report.

Computer generated ‘checklist style’ reports are a slight step up from a hand written checklist as they can allow more extensive commentary and the addition of narrated photos, BUT only if the inspector is willing to put in the hours of time to modify the out of the box software template and then the extra time required on a per inspection basis to create the report at site or back in their office. Unfortunately, many don’t.

You can see that I am not a fan of checklist reports. I wish I was, they are much faster and easier than the reports I utilize in my business. Not many inspectors relish the idea of spending a day behind a desk creating a report and I am no exception. I am always looking for ways to decrease the report production time but always ensure that my number 1 priority is informing and protecting the client. In my opinion the best inspection report is a narrative report created specifically for the inspected dwelling that is augmented with lots of annotated photos. This is much the same format used by most engineers. The process is intense in the time frame typically allotted for subject removals and usually takes between 10-15 hours, but this has been the only way I have personally found that allows me to ensure that my client is as fully informed as possible.

How can I reduce the potential liability of buying a Condo

In my last post I was prompted to comment on the liability that can be present when buying multi-family-dwellings after reading two articles from the Vancouver Courier.

I will now try to give provide the reader tools for a thorough due diligence process to hopefully avoid a large portion of the potential liability that exists with these purchases.

My number one piece of advice is to have the unit inspected. This may seem like self serving advice, and in part it may be, but it is imperative that you have a Condo inspected before purchasing if you have any chance of avoiding liability. As this CMHC research report shows, many of the people that ran into financial difficulty after purchasing a Condo, did so because they did not have the Condo first inspected (in the studdy this represented 29 of the 40 case studies!).

The Vancouver Courier articles discussed how you cannot rely on the documents provided by the vendor and I cannot agree more. First of all, the commonly provided 2 years of minutes is not nearly a long enough time frame to properly evaluate the buildings performance. But it also is far too short of a period of time to properly evaluate the performance of the STRATA and PROPERTY MANAGER to ensure they are capable of properly managing the best interests of the building and owners. This is often a much larger area of liability for a potential buyer than that represented by the structure itself and a process that is often overlooked. A poorly managed and maintained building significantly escalates the costs of repairs and often the complexity and duration of those repairs.

Finally, another reason to not rely on minutes or property disclosure statements (PDS) is that they rarely reflect an accurate assessment of the property. A PDS is often not truthful and as I wrote about on another blog entry, there does not seem to be a reasonable way to hold the vendor responsible for what they fill out in the PDS. Likewise, Strata Minutes seldom tell the whole storey. Strata Council are of course owners and are often reluctant to divulge any information in minutes when they know that information could lower the values of the homes they own and make it difficult for them to sell in the future. They participate in the practice of “In Camera” meetings where no official minutes of what is discussed are kept or made available to the public and instead the discussions and resulting actions are “off the record”. This is of course illegal but regularly occurs in Strata’s across the lower mainland.

So, what can a buyer do to reduce their potential liability? I mentioned above that my number one recommendation is to have the unit inspected. Well my second piece of advice is to choose the ‘right’ inspector.

When the average time spent on site by a home inspector for an apartment style Condo is 1.5 hours or less, it is important to realize that this type of inspection will often not be thorough enough to have any meaningful impact on the potential liability you face as a purchaser. Further, the checklist style reports, usually provided by this style of inspector, are often unable to sufficiently inform the purchaser on any deficiencies or liabilities that this brief inspection uncovered.

Instead, a purchaser should look for an inspector that is going to take the time to perform a thorough inspection of not just the unit but also the building envelope/exterior, roof, parkade, and all common mechanical areas. Most important of all, look for an inspector who’s ‘process’ includes a detailed review of all engineering reports commissioned by the Strata in the last 5-10 years.

As home inspectors, we are generalists that if correctly trained are able to usually identify problems or the risk of problems. But we are only performing a visual inspection which has many limitations to defining the true condition of a building. A reputable building envelope firm will go beyond visual inspection and will disassemble components or perform some destructive testing to determine the full condition of the building enclosure. By including the review of these detailed engineering reports, an inspector can then provide a lot more insight to a potential purchaser to allow them to make a more informed decision.

In my next entry, I will discuss the type of report you should ensure your inspector provides and why that style of report is going to benefit you.

Risk associated with the purchase of Multi-Family-Dwellings in Greater Vancouver

I recently came across these Vancouver Courier articles (Condo Pitfalls & Condo Nightmares). They do a fairly accurate and thorough job of discussing the pitfalls that buyers face when buying condo style apartments and townhouses in the Vancouver region.


We have found that too many buyers in the market today do not truly understand the liability they face when buying into multi-family. We often get comments like “That is the Strata’s responsibility; we do not have to worry about that”. We have heard of many people that have gone bankrupt or lost their Condo because of special assessments for unexpected repairs that they could not afford. I have never heard of this happening to buyers of single-family-dwellings.

The facts are that the purchase of any multi-family-dwelling typically represents a significantly higher level of possible liability over the purchase of an average single family home. One of the key reasons for this is the fact that most multi-family-buildings are quite a bit taller and larger than a typical single family house and as such have a much greater exposure to wind driven rain. This higher exposure will then accentuate problems with a water shedding surface with poor design and maintenance.

These articles somewhat suggest that the problem may be behind us or is confined to buildings of the 80’s and 90’s. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many studies, including those by CMHC, state that there has only been an approximate 50% of the buildings that have or will have problems fixed to date. This leaves tens of thousands of units that are still out their in need of remediation.

As the articles discuss, even a fully or partially remediated building does not always significantly lower your liability. Many early attempts at remediation did nothing to change the actual design of the water shedding surfaces and are as such destined to repeat the cycle of repair and the extreme costs to the owners that result from those repairs.

Brand new buildings are also not a guarantee of quality or lower liability. Our inspections have uncovered many buildings 1-5 year old and still under warranty that have water ingress into parkades, roof top decks, poorly detailed and back slopping flashings, etc, the list goes on. Just because a building is constructed post 2000 does not mean you do not have to still be careful in your selection and diligence.

You often can also not rely on the fact that there is a warranty in place. We have come across an alarming number of Strata’s that have not commissioned a full building envelope assessment prior to the 5yr Water Ingress Warranty expiry and as such lost out on the opportunity to claim problems that were present. And those that do file a warranty claim, and are successful in their claim, can often be met with short term repairs done by the developer in order to get past the warranty period. Often these short term repairs saddle the owners with a lifetime of accelerated maintenance and increased cost of ownership going forward.

So it is very important to perform due diligence when purchasing a multi-family-dwellings and I will discuss ways to do so in upcoming blog posts.

Property Disclosure Statements

Global TV ran a news story last night (link) regarding a couple that bought a house that had been previously gutted by fire.  The problem was that this had not been disclosed by the previous buyer and the buyer is now saddled with a $200K bill to repair even though it is obvious that the previous vendor would have been aware of this damage.

The problem with property disclosure sheets (PDS) is that they are seldom filled out in an accurate manner.  The vendor may not know or may just lie about the condition of the home.  I have often seen deficiencies in homes that are very visible yet not identified accurately on the PDS.  There also does not seem to be any enforment of the document and limited opportunities for recourse.

SENWI has long advocated to change the laws regarding the PDS.  We feel, that like a car, ALL significant repairs or renovations over $5K should be registered against the property.  A purchaser should be able to receive a report from the land titles office, as part of the purchase conditions, that provides the full history of the home.  Contractors and Municipalities should be required by law to register their activities with the dwelling (like renovations, attendance by fire services for fires, floods, grow ops., storm damage, mechanical damage from vehicles, etc). 

For now however, buyers should not place any faith in a PDS (only pay attention to defects positively identified as being present and ignoring those that are identified as unknown or not present).  Buyers should always hire an independent home inspector (not the one your agent recommends). An independent home inspector will work for you (and only you) and attempt to reduce your liabilities in buying a dwelling that you have no previous knowledge of by means of a thorough and detailed inspection of the dwelling.