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.

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