Strata Condition Assessment & Depreciation Report Support
Your strata is on the clock for a depreciation report. Before you commission one — and after you receive it — there is condition work that makes the whole exercise better and cheaper. That is the work c4u does.
We are not one of the six professions permitted to prepare the statutory report. We say so plainly further down this page. What we do is look hard at your common property and give your council a clear, photographed, independent account of its condition.
What changed, and why your council is reading this
Every strata corporation in British Columbia with five or more lots must obtain a depreciation report, and must do it on a five-year cycle. The annual three-quarter-vote deferral that many councils relied on is gone — a strata can no longer vote to put it off.
For stratas in British Columbia outside Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Capital Regional District, the compliance date is 1 July 2027. That includes the whole Okanagan, north and south. Corporations inside those three regions work to a different date; check yours with your qualified professional.
Two years sounds comfortable until you count the AGM cycle you have to work through to approve the spend.
Who is allowed to prepare the report
Since 1 July 2025, a statutory BC depreciation report may only be prepared by a member of one of six professional groups:
- Professional engineers and licensees (EGBC)
- Architects and architectural technologists (AIBC)
- Applied science technologists and certified technicians (ASTTBC)
- Accredited Appraisers (Appraisal Institute of Canada)
- Certified reserve planners (REIC)
- Professional quantity surveyors (CIQS)
c4u Inspections is a licensed home and commercial inspection firm. We are not on that list, and we do not prepare statutory depreciation reports. Your report must come from one of the six designations above. Anyone telling your council otherwise is either out of date or wrong, and the corporation carries the consequence.
What c4u can do for your council
Pre-report condition assessment of the common property
Before your qualified professional starts, we walk the common property and document what is there and what state it is in — roofing, building envelope, cladding, decks and balconies, walkways, railings, parking and drainage, common mechanical and electrical, and the interior common areas. Your council goes into the engagement knowing its own building, with photographs and notes in hand, instead of finding out on someone else's hourly rate.
Building envelope and component review you can hand over
A written, photographed condition record of the components your depreciation report will have to cost out. It is prepared for you to give to your qualified professional as background information. It does not replace their inspection, their judgement or their report — it informs it.
Independent second opinion and interim condition work
If a component has started to fail, if an owner or the council disputes what a report says about condition, or if you need a straight answer on the roof before you approve a special levy, we will look at it and tell you what we find. Independent of the contractor quoting the work.
What the northern climate does to a strata’s component list
Corporations up this end of the valley tend to have the same few line items dominate their reserve planning, and they are worth walking before anyone starts costing them.
Snow and ice
Low-slope and shallow-pitch roofs, gutters, and the walkways and stairs underneath them. On mountain corporations — the strata stock around Silver Star is the obvious example — snow load, ice damming and freeze protection on exposed plumbing are the components that actually fail.
Seasonal occupancy
Where a proportion of units sit empty and winterised for months, the common-property failures nobody was there to notice are the expensive ones: a slow leak, a failed heat trace, a sump that stopped running.
Site drainage and retaining
Hillside and bench sites — Vernon's newer hillside subdivisions and the resort-area corporations toward Predator Ridge among them — carry retaining walls, cut-and-fill slopes and drainage that belong on the component list and often are not on it.
Age
Vernon's low-rise stock includes a lot of buildings well past their first envelope, and an older corporation's cladding, windows and balconies will drive the reserve schedule more than anything else in the report.
(Places are named here to describe conditions, not to state a coverage boundary.)
What you get
A written report with photographs, notations and recommendations, delivered online — plain enough to read aloud at a meeting, detailed enough for a professional to work from. We walk the property with a council representative afterwards and go through it while you can still see what we are pointing at.
How it fits alongside your qualified professional
- 1
Council decides it needs the depreciation report (five-year cycle)
- 2
c4u condition assessment of the common property← optional, before you engage
- 3
Council engages one of the six designated professions
- 4
Qualified professional prepares the statutory depreciation report
- 5
Council budgets, plans and reports to owners
- 6
c4u interim or second-opinion condition work← optional, between cycles
Talk to us before you commission anything
Tell us your building type, the number of lots and your deadline. If what you need is the statutory report itself, we will say so and point you at the right kind of professional. If condition work will genuinely help your council, we will tell you exactly what it covers.
If the council is buying, refinancing or taking on a building rather than maintaining one, an ASTM E2018 Property Condition Assessment is usually the better fit. It sits alongside the rest of our commercial inspection work, which we run from Vernon across the North Okanagan and the wider valley.
Call or text (250) 212-4025, or book online.
Get the condition work your council needs
Before you commission, or between cycles — an independent, photographed account of your common property.