Records
What a status certificate must contain
A status certificate is the single document a buyer’s lawyer relies on, and the one most likely to generate a claim when it is wrong.
Under section 76 of the Ontario Condominium Act, 1998, a corporation must deliver a status certificate within ten days of a written request and the prescribed fee. That clock does not pause because a manager is on holiday or a board meeting has not happened yet.
The certificate carries the corporation’s statement of the unit’s common expenses, any arrears, any increase already approved, the reserve fund balance and the most recent reserve fund study, current insurance, any known circumstance that may result in an increase, outstanding judgments and legal proceedings, and any lease of a unit the corporation knows about.
The items most often missing are the ones that live outside the accounting system: an approved but unbilled special assessment, a lien in progress, an insurance renewal that changed the deductible, a legal matter the board discussed but nobody wrote down, and a rule change passed at the last meeting. Each of those is a decision that happened somewhere — and if the only record of it is a thread in someone’s mailbox, it will be missed.
The practical fix is not a better checklist. It is that approvals, legal matters and the reserve position all sit in one structured record, so assembling a certificate is a query rather than an archaeology project.
Governance
How spending approval thresholds should work
A threshold that is too low stops a manager fixing a leak on a Saturday. Too high, and the board is accountable for money it never saw.
An approval threshold is the dollar figure above which a manager may not commit the corporation without board approval. It is set by the board, usually reflected in the management agreement, and it is the single most important governance control most corporations have.
Setting it well means separating two different things. The first is routine operating spend that recurs and is already budgeted — cleaning, landscaping, the elevator maintenance contract. The second is discretionary or capital spend that changes the corporation’s position. A threshold that catches the first produces approval fatigue, directors stop reading, and the rubber stamp becomes the norm. A threshold that misses the second is not a control at all.
Most Ontario corporations land somewhere between $1,000 and $10,000 depending on size, with a separate and lower threshold for anything drawn from the reserve fund, and an explicit emergency provision allowing a manager to act immediately with the approval recorded after the fact. That emergency provision is not a loophole — it is what stops a board writing a policy nobody can follow at 2am with water coming through a ceiling.
Whatever the number, it only works if it is applied automatically and the votes are captured by name. A threshold enforced by a manager remembering it is a preference, not a control.
Records
Records a corporation must keep, and for how long
Section 55 in practice: what is kept permanently, what for seven years, and how an owner request actually runs.
A condominium corporation is required to keep adequate records, and the categories are specific: the declaration, by-laws and rules; minutes of owners’ meetings and board meetings; financial records; the record of owners and mortgagees; agreements the corporation has entered into; and the reserve fund study.
Retention differs by category. Constating documents, minutes and the record of owners are kept for the life of the corporation. Financial records and most agreements run to seven years. Records of an individual owner’s account are kept while relevant and then disposed of under the corporation’s retention schedule — and note that keeping personal information longer than the purpose requires is itself a privacy problem, not a safe default.
An owner may request records in writing using the prescribed form. The corporation has 30 days to respond with a written response, and the records follow within a further period depending on whether they are core records and whether a fee applies. Some records must be redacted before delivery — anything that would disclose another owner’s personal information, matters under litigation or solicitor-client privilege, or employee records.
Two failures account for most disputes here. The first is a corporation that cannot locate a record it is required to hold. The second is over-disclosure — handing an owner a minute book with another unit’s arrears or a legal opinion still in it. Both are record-keeping problems before they are legal ones.
Finance
Reading a reserve fund study
What the numbers mean, where the assumptions hide, and what to ask before approving it.
A reserve fund study projects the cost of major repair and replacement of the common elements over at least thirty years, and sets the contribution needed to meet it. A comprehensive study is required, then updated on a cycle — with site inspection, and without — so the corporation is never working from a decade-old picture.
The projection is only as good as three assumptions buried inside it: the inflation rate applied to future costs, the interest rate earned on the fund, and the remaining useful life assigned to each component. A one-point change in any of them moves the required contribution materially. A board approving a study without knowing which numbers were used is approving a conclusion, not a plan.
The second thing to look for is what the study did not cover. Studies price the repair and replacement of existing common elements. They do not price improvements, code upgrades triggered by a replacement, or a component the engineer could not access on the day. Any of those can arrive later as a special assessment.
Useful questions before approving: which components drive the largest expenditures in the next ten years; what inflation and interest assumptions were used and why; what was inspected versus estimated from records; and what happens to the contribution schedule if a major component fails five years early. A study that cannot answer those is a document, not a study.
Communication
Electronic notices and owner consent
What an owner must agree to before you can email a notice, and how to keep the consent record straight.
A corporation may deliver notices electronically, but only to an owner who has agreed to it and has provided an address for that purpose. Consent is given per owner, it is specific, and it can be withdrawn — at which point delivery reverts to the physical methods the Act allows.
The record that matters is not the email address. It is the consent itself: who gave it, when, for which address, and whether it is still in force. When a notice of a meeting is later challenged, the question is whether the corporation was entitled to deliver it that way to that owner — and the answer is a consent record or it is nothing.
Two operational traps follow. The first is unit turnover: consent belongs to the owner, not the unit, so a sale resets it. The second is deliverability. A notice sent from a generic address, or from the management company’s domain rather than the corporation’s, is more likely to be filtered — and a notice in a spam folder is functionally undelivered even where it was legally sent.
The practical answer is a mailbox that belongs to the corporation, properly authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, with delivery and consent both recorded against the owner.
Transition
Changing management companies without losing your records
What the corporation should ask for, what belongs to whom, and how to make a handover a non-event.
The corporation’s records belong to the corporation. That is uncontroversial in principle and routinely painful in practice, because the records usually live inside systems the outgoing management company holds the account for.
A transition typically produces three categories. Records that are unambiguously the corporation’s: the register of owners, minutes, agreements, financial records, correspondence about the corporation’s affairs, the reserve fund study. Records that are the management company’s own: internal templates, staff notes, its own business records. And a grey middle — the working files, the vendor history, the ticket trail — which is where arguments happen, and which is often the most operationally valuable material of all.
A board can remove most of that risk before it signs anything, by asking three questions of any platform in use. In whose name is the account held? What exactly can the corporation export, and can it do so without the outgoing manager’s cooperation? And on the day the agreement ends, does access change hands, or does data have to move?
A handover where the corporation’s tenancy stays in place and the operator’s access is simply revoked on a date the board sets is a different event from a handover that begins with a shared drive and a box of PDFs. The first takes an afternoon; the second takes a quarter and never fully finishes.
These guides describe Ontario condominium practice in general terms and are not legal advice. Boards should take advice from their own counsel on their own corporation.
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