Last night was our special meeting for my strata. I waited an hour and 20 minutes before everyone was signed in and the meeting got under way! It was crazy! We had to vote on 2 issues. The first issue was vote by role call, too. And there were almost 300 homeowners there.

Here's some background info...

A few years ago, I purchased a new condo. It was the last new building of the strata. The first couple of buildings in the strata were built about 10 years prior. They are leaky. They've been needing repairs for years now. When I moved in, I had no idea about these older buildings. The agent (that was obviously not working for me) did not disclose this information. When I confronted him about it, he said they were rumours and would have been illegal for him to say anything. However, legally, he was supposed to show me the strata meeting minutes from the last 5 years. Had I seen those, I would have been aware of the issues. And I would have thought twice about buying my home.

The first big obstacle was figuring out who should pay. The new homeowners who moved into their brand new buildings weren't even around when the leaks first came about, so it would have been unfair for us to pay. However, since everyone is part of the same strata, legally, the costs should be shared equally.  And the courts went with what was legal.

Over the last few years, everybody had voted against doing the repairs. I guess nobody wanted to spend the money. However, it's time for the buildings to be repaired. Legally, those have to be done, but work cannot start until everyone votes to approve the cost. The point of last night's meeting was to approve or oppose the cost.

I think everyone did want to approve the cost (the longer we wait, the more it's going to cost). However, almost all the new homeowners, i.e., the ones who bought into the new non-leaky buildings, had signed an indemnity from the developers.) Once again, my agent encouraged me to sign this and did not really explain what signing it meant.) So a few weeks before this meeting, we got several letters from the developers telling us that we had to vote their way because we signed the indemnity (or else lose some of our rights in regards to our warranty).

Needless to say, the developers strongly advised us to vote against the cost. They felt the cost did not have to be so high. However, their estimates do not cover some new building bylaws that just came into effect this week. Ugh.

So...the issue will continue to drag on. The only bright side is that I don't have to pay for any of this yet. The cost could get buy me a brand new car, and I am saving up for one of those!! 

And if we want to sue anybody to recover our costs, the repairs must be done first. There are a lot of angry people out there, and they are especially angry at the real estate agents and their agency who were not very upfront about this issue. Or they lied. Some homeowners were told that the developers were going to cover the costs of the leaky buildings. And then there are those who feel the developers should cover all the costs because they did a shoddy job in the beginning!

Even this is a sucky time knowing that I may have a really big bill coming, it is also interesting to see what pans out. These meetings get people very excited. There was yelling too!