The Data Your Strata Corporation Should Always Control
There's a line in the Strata Property Act that most council members have never read, and it's more important than almost anything else in this series.
Section 35 says the strata corporation must prepare and keep its records. Not the property manager. Not the management company. The corporation—which is to say, the owners, acting through the council.
A council can delegate the work of record-keeping to a manager, and almost every strata does. But the responsibility never transfers. Legally, the records were always yours. The question worth asking, before you ever need to find out the hard way, is whether they're actually in your hands.
The law is clearer than you'd expect
BC's legislation is not vague about this. Section 35 sets out a specific list of records a strata corporation must prepare and retain: minutes of general and council meetings, budgets and financial statements, books of account showing money received and spent and the reason for each entry, written contracts, insurance policies, depreciation reports, and engineers' or other reports on the repair or maintenance of major items.
Retention periods are spelled out in the regulations, and some are long. Minutes and the strata plan are retained permanently. Reports on major items must be kept until the item they relate to is disposed of or replaced. Contracts and insurance policies, at least six years past expiry.
And when a management contract ends, section 37 requires the outgoing manager to hand over any of those records in their possession within four weeks. If they don't, the regulation sets the penalty at $1,000.
On paper, this is a well-designed system. In practice, most councils discover its limits at the worst possible moment.
What the law protects, and what it doesn't
Read that list again and notice what it's made of. It is, almost entirely, a record of transactions and formalities. What was decided. What was paid. What was signed. What an engineer formally reported.
Now think about what a council actually needs to know to run a building well:
Which contractor did excellent work on the boiler, and which one you'd never call again. That the parkade membrane was patched rather than replaced, and the council intended to revisit it before winter. That a unit has had recurring water ingress and the last two councils suspected the cause but never confirmed it. That the landscaping invoice always spikes in spring for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.
None of that is in section 35. Not because the law is badly written—it isn't—but because the law was designed to guarantee accountability, not continuity. It ensures owners can audit what was done with their money. It was never designed to make sure the next council understands the building.
So the records you are legally guaranteed to get back are exactly the ones that tell you the least. The invoice comes back. The reasoning behind it never existed as a document in the first place.
"They have it" is not the same as "we can get it"
There's a second gap, quieter than the first.
Even where records genuinely do exist in the management company's system, existing and being accessible to you are different things. Your history is stored inside someone else's software, organized according to their internal filing logic, retrievable at their pace. A council member who wants to know what happened with the roof in 2021 sends an email and waits. The answer, when it comes, is a PDF—not a story.
That's fine when the relationship is working. It's fine right up until the moment you're switching management companies, and the same building history you've been relying on for years is being packed into boxes—physical or digital—by an organization that no longer has a commercial reason to be helpful.
Four weeks. A $1,000 penalty if they miss the deadline. Against a building's entire operational memory, that is not a lot of protection. And the penalty tells you something about how the law sees this: it's a paperwork obligation, priced accordingly. Your building's history isn't priced at all, because it was never really on the ledger.
This isn't an argument against property managers
Let's be direct, because it would be easy to read this the wrong way.
Good property managers are enormously valuable. They know things councils don't, they handle work no volunteer wants to, and the best of them are the single steadiest presence a building has—often the only person who's been around longer than the council. Nothing here is a complaint about them.
But a manager is a service, and services end. Contracts get cancelled with two months' notice and a 3/4 vote. Managers move firms. Firms get acquired. Meanwhile the building stays exactly where it is, and so do the owners.
Any part of your building's memory that lives only in a manager's inbox, or only in a management company's proprietary system, is memory you're renting. It works beautifully—until the day the arrangement changes, and you discover which parts you actually owned.
What ownership looks like in practice
It's less dramatic than it sounds. Owning your building's history doesn't mean distrusting anyone or duplicating your manager's work. It means the strata corporation keeps its own running journal of the building—maintained alongside the formal records, not instead of them.
What was done, when, and by whom. What was observed but not yet acted on. What the council decided, and why it decided that rather than the alternative. Which vendors earned trust and which didn't. The things that never make it into an invoice and never survive a handover.
That record should carry three properties. It should be complete in the sense the formal records aren't—context, not just cost. It should be portable, so it survives a change of manager without a four-week wait or a $1,000 penalty clause. And it should be continuous, carrying forward through every AGM to whoever sits on council next.
The law already says these records are the strata corporation's responsibility. All that's left is to make them, in practice, the strata corporation's possession.
Your management company will change. Your council will change every year. The building, and its history, belongs to the people who live in it.
Pleno helps strata councils keep a building journal they own and control—a running record of maintenance, decisions, and building history that carries forward through every council change, independently of the property management company.