Pat Docking at her building complex in Vancouver on Jan. 30.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Only after Pat Docking’s flight to Mexico had landed did she find out that the property-management company for her Vancouver condo was cancelling the building and its residents as clients.
As the president of her strata council, she spent her holiday and the next several weeks trying desperately to find a new company to take on their modest 28-unit building on the city’s west side at 49th and Arbutus for something close to the $12,000 a year they were paying before. She got passes from all of them.
In the meantime, Ms. Docking, a former federal-government specialist in disaster management, spent days and some nights dealing with the kinds of issues that a small and relatively new building inevitably has, which accumulated because the previous company provided only minimal service.
That included a failing retaining wall that needs to be fixed immediately, which means finding contractors and reviewing bids for the $200,000 to $300,000 project; setting up special meetings to get other residents to review the bids; making sure depreciation reports are done in the required timeline; dealing with stinkbugs and leaky sprinklers; and seriously studying the provincial Strata Property Act to make sure the strata council isn’t not doing anything illegal, especially with the recent changes banning stratas from prohibiting rentals.
“This is like two full-time jobs, between catching up on what’s been missing the last year and then now,” Ms. Docking said.
It’s a situation that many in the condo world say is going to become more common – and with much bigger buildings than Ms. Docking’s – as the province runs short of people willing and qualified to take on strata-property management at the same time that dozens of new buildings are going up in cities around British Columbia every year.
“About 40 to 50 per cent of strata managers are boomers and retiring soon. We’re already at half-capacity,” said Chris Churchill, the president of FirstService Residential, the largest company in B.C. (and North America) with about 650 buildings in its portfolio.
Mr. Churchill and others have been warning for years there’s an impending crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, highlighted the need for property managers as a whole new raft of issues emerged: keeping buildings clean, dealing with repairs, figuring out elevator and delivery protocols, and managing disputes over how the pool or exercise room should be managed.
Mr. Churchill notes 2,000 strata buildings have been constructed since 2015 and that there are 89 current holes in the ground for new highrises in the Lower Mainland: “When you’re throwing up hundreds of towers, who is going to manage them?”
A casual browse through online job postings proves the high demand. Dozens of job postings are listed from small boutique firms to major developers, with salaries of $42,000 to $60,000 for those just starting out and $100,000-plus for experienced managers. People get paid by the number of doors they manage, with newcomers handling 600-700 doors and experienced people managing 1,100 to 1,200.
Strata property managers typically have to go through the strata-management licensing course at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, which administers it on behalf of the BC Financial Services Authority. It currently costs $1,150 in tuition, plus exam fees, and people have up to a year to complete all the assignments and write the final exam, although many do it in six months.
Mr. Churchill said it has become a choice for former strata-council members or retired professionals looking for a second career. But that pool isn’t providing enough new people to compensate for the attrition in the industry. And many people who haven’t been on strata councils themselves don’t realize that strata management is a real job.
“I don’t think enough people know this career actually exists,” he said.
Among other issues, outsiders think the job is like being a janitor or a rental-building property manager.
“The days when strata-property managers were more akin to a janitor than a lawyer are gone. It’s more like being a lawyer now,” says Jason Kurtz, whose company, Stratawest Management Ltd., oversees about 14,000 doors. “Long-term planning is increasingly part of our role. It used to be much more reactive.”
Besides being responsible for keeping the elevators running and managing disputes about parking or garbage, managers have to be up to speed on the latest requirements of the Strata Property Act, along with the law on privacy, as well as along bylaws passed by individual stratas aimed at regulating the behaviour of everyone in the building.
“Bylaw enforcement is one of the bigger time sucks in our industry,” Mr. Kurtz said.
The 1,500 lawsuits involving strata councils that show up in the B.C. Supreme Court database is ample evidence of the legal complexities.
Added to that, the hours are wonky because of the proliferation of evening strata-council meetings: “The work style doesn’t fit with the new generation,” Mr. Kurtz said.
So, what are the solutions?
Mr. Churchill would like to see, first, government-funded advertising campaign to raise awareness, and second, support for firms who are bringing on new people to continue the training they need even after they have passed the UBC property-management course.
Mr. Kurtz said stratas need to recognize they’re running a business and act accordingly. That means having council meetings during normal business working hours, not on evenings and weekends.
In the meantime, many more strata-council members may find themselves in the same position as Ms. Docking, who spent part of a recent weekend attending a training session put on by the Condo Home Owners Association on property management.
She was hoping to get new leads on other companies that might be willing to accept them, though she had already located one firm in White Rock willing to provide certain services on an à-la-carte basis. But it can’t take them on until September.
“So, someone else has to step up,” Ms. Docking said – which turns out to be mainly her, though others in the building have been trying to pitch in as much as possible.
“It’s a bit daunting,” she said, as she contemplated the 25-page package she needed to prepare for the council’s special meeting on the retaining-wall contract.
“It could have consequences if I don’t get this right.”