If you are a condo owner and you decide to sell your unit, you will be advised that you are responsible to supply a vast list of Condo Corporation documents to any potential purchaser. You will quickly find out that your management company has all those documents and they are more than happy to charge you for them. The management companies, by law, must house your Corporation’s documents and by doing so they have recognized a massive revenue stream. 

The management companies should be making money by providing a good management service not by exploiting the Corporation and charging owners for documents that are legally the property of the Corporation. Keep in mind, “the Corporation” is YOU, the owners, collectively. When your Board of Directors has a meeting, you have every right to know what is in those minutes without having to pay for them. YOU voted the Board in to represent YOU. 

“ These are YOUR documents! Find a management company that doesn’t charge you to store or purchase your documents.”

We can grant the management companies one lenience and that is if they make all documents available to all owners at least once. This means that you need to be a savvy owner and when those meeting minutes come available on a web site or by some other platform, you need to jump on them and save them to an electronic or paper file. Some documents are provided to the owners and are legislated to be provided to you, but this is where you need to take responsibility and make sure you keep a copy of anything that is provided to you otherwise you are going to pay dearly for it when you decide to sell. 

We have done some research and on the extreme end of things we found that if we needed a full set of documents to sell a condo and we ordered them from the management company, it would cost over $1,000.00. $1,153.00 to be exact. 

This is where the Board of Directors, maybe prompted by owners, need to push back. Your Minister of Service Alberta has put a cap on what management companies can charge for documents but this is a slippery slope for government to be venturing into what the private sector can charge and as we have seen so far, the cap can still amount to over $500 for a full set of documents. The cap has not solved the problem. It is up to you, the owners to stand your ground and demand change. These are YOUR documents! Find a management company that doesn’t charge you to store or purchase your documents. Don’t stand for buying your documents back from a management company that you are already paying a management fee to!