“You pay one small cheque a month and you’ll have no worries because professionals will do all the work.” That is appealing sales pitch from the developers and real estate agents that condo buyers find so allurging.
The news article at the end of this essay, shows how having a “no worries” atitude can cost a unit owner thousands, especially when the corporation’s insurance deductables increase.
Water leaks
It takes a lot of pumps, tanks, pipes and valves to get hot and cold water and kitchen and bathroom drains to work in high rise residental buildings. The corporation is responsible to maintain and repair all the piping that runs up and down the floors.
The owners responsibilty
However, the individual owners are responsible for maintaining the water pipes, traps, valves and toilet seals that are inside their unit. These parts do not last forever.
If this old tap leaks or has low water pressure due to a clogged strainer, it is the owner who has to pay the $200 to $300 plumber’s bill. Not the corporation.
Have an old trap under your sink that is leaking? The owner pays.
Same thing if the valves under the sink are leaking or are so old that they will no long work as intended.
If the baseboards and drywall behind your sink gets mouldy because your bathroom sink pipes have a small leak, the owner pays for the plumber and for the general contractor that will replace the drywall and baseboards.
The costs to replace the tap and fix the wall and drywall can run $600 or more.
The costs to call in a licenced contractor in Canada
In the spring of 2019, I was in China. Late one Saturday afternoon a close friend of mine cracked the tank on her the toilet. She immediately shut off the water valve.
Then she thought about what she had to do. Her and I took a bus to a shopping mall first thing on Sunday morning. By 9:50 am she picked out the toilet she wanted and paid for it with the understanding that the toilet had to be delivered that day, the old one removed and taken off the site, and the new one installed.
At 12:30 pm two men showed up at her apartment. They removed the old toilet, installed the new one and was out of her apartment by 1:20 pm. The cost of the repairs? Forty yuan. ($8.00 Canadian). Of course she paid in cash.
When I tell this story to Canadian plumbers, they laugh and say that in Toronto you would be lucky if you could get it delivered on a Sunday and even luckier if you could get a plumber to show up. If he did, it would cost about $800 Canadian.
What do you mean I have to pay?
Some condo owners get really upset when they are told that they have to pay for repairs in their unit. They figure that the corporation will pay for everything.
A condo owner in Richmond Hill was surprised when a plumber showed up at her unit and charged her $240 to snake her toilet. He was in her unit for only 15 minutes.
She was charged travel time, a truck fee, the cost to snake the toilet, plus HST.
Condo owner dinged $10,000 for improperly seated toilet that caused B.C. strata sewage leak
Georgia Strait
by Carlito Pabloon 24 March 2020
You may want to check if your toilet is loose and not properly seated. That faulty home fixture may cause a sewage leakage.
If you live in a condo, that could cause damage not only to your property but to others as well. Aside from repairs, a defective toilet may also cost you more money, as what happened with condo owner Bhupinder Singh Sandhu.
Sandhu owns a second floor condo unit at a B.C. strata complex. A sewage backup occurred at his home in 2019, causing damage to a unit below. The strata paid for repairs, and charged its $10,000 insurance deductible to Sandhu.
Sandhu claimed that he is not responsible for the leak, arguing that there was a blockage in the common property’s sewer pipe.
Sandhu brought the dispute before a B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal, and the case was decided in favour of the strata by Kate Campbell, vice chair of the administrative tribunal.
In her reasons for decision, Campbell relied on the findings of the strata’s plumbing contractor, Redpoint Mechanical Services. In its invoice, Redpoint reported that it removed the toilet in Unit 217, which belongs to Sandhu, and accessed the drain.
“Toilet loose on its mounting posts. Flange on right hand side cracked at bolt mounting point. Wax seal has failed due to movement,” Redpoint stated.
The plumbing company also reported that it is unable to reinstall toilet “until flange is repaired”.
Campbell wrote in her reasons for decision that while there was an “unidentified blockage in a common property sewer line”, Sandhu’s “broken toilet was effectively a weak point in the system, so when the line blockage caused a sewer backup, the sewage escaped from around the toilet and into the strata building”.
“Since the toilet was loose, and this was identifiable upon inspection, I find the owner did not meet the standard of care by reasonably maintaining the toilet,” Campbell wrote.
https://bit.ly/2xmgaOC
Condo life: Worry-free living?
But for the "blockage in a common property sewer line" the condition of the toilet was irrelevant. The CRT, and Kate Campbell in particular, systemically defer to strata corporations to the disproportionate detriment of owners of residential strata property. Very few contractors in BC's multi-billion dollar strata industry can afford to be blacklisted for daring to support the owner of strata property rather than the property manager who instructs them and pays them.