Start by fetching a full-sized condo plan from the Land Titles Office, as the small-format version sometimes provided in disclosure documents is reduced too much to be useful. At only $3, condo plans are a bargain, and should be much more widely obtained and referred to. For that price, you will receive any number of pages, as one might show the building(s) site, another the basement parking layouts and yet another the suite dimensions. For a few extra dollars you can order the “condominium plan additional sheet”, which will detail current members of the board of directors and any legal registrations that have been filed against the corporation.
Lay the full-size condo plan out on your dining table, and get yourself a pen, a calculator and a highlighter. Studying the site-plan page, you may see that your building lies within a larger bare-land condo development. The development may have been built in stages, and as each lot was split off it was further subdivided (“redivision”) into building lots or suites within apartment buildings. It you’re living inner city, it’s more likely that the site plan will show old house lots that your high-rise building unified into one large condominium building site.

Note that not all walls in condominium buildings are property lines, and that not all property lines will have walls when you actually stand in that location. Examples: Your building’s common-property ground-floor area is not subdivided on the plan, but may in fact house the lobby, a laundry room, exercise and meeting rooms, hallways and elevator shafts. Conversely, a parkade might show many titled parking stalls and their property lines on the plan, but in fact there are few walls in the parking area. Remember that the plan shows property divisions, not necessarily wall divisions.

Find your suite by its actual location on the plan and mark the civic-address suite number on it. If you’re about to buy the suite, make sure that the legal unit number for the suite matches the legal description of the property you’re buying. Do the same check for the parking stall, if it’s titled property, by actually carrying the plan into the parkade. Highlight your property on the plan for ease of reference. Note that the plan was surveyed and registered before civic addresses were assigned. Be careful never to confuse your property’s civic address (the number on the door) with its legal unit number. There can easily be a legal unit 101 at the top of a condo tower, as well as a civic-address suite 101 on the ground floor. Confusion can be disastrous (like buying the wrong suite!), and precious few Realtors or condo property managers take this issue seriously enough.

On the table of units, their unit factors and their floor areas, highlight your property(s), and again write in the civic address of the suite. Titled parking stalls, by the way, have no civic address, and should only be numbered as per the condo plan. It baffles me that some buildings number their stalls in another sequence. Why create another numbering system? Now write on your plan the conversion of your unit factor (1/10,000) to a percentage by moving the decimal left two spaces. Ie: a unit factor of 236 becomes 2.36%. Your property is responsible for that percentage of revenue raised by condo fees. Now convert the metric suite measure to square feet (sq. M x 10.764 = sq. ft.), as we still seem to be more familiar with floor areas stated that way.

If you’re reading the plan before buying a condo home, ponder the unit factor table. Unless the plan declares how unit factors were allocated, look for any unfairness in the allocations. A few converting developers have kept some suites or commercial units for themselves, and allocated a unit factor of 1 to each of them. While a court might eventually overturn such an unfair allocation, you don’t need the headache. Most often unit factors are allocated in approximate proportion to square footage, but some plans give more factors to upper floors. Titled parking stalls are usually given factors on a smaller, non-floor-area basis, and titled storage lockers are often given just a single unit factor.

Some plans will carry a notation stating that homeowners are personally responsible for their suites’ exterior windows and doors. Alberta’s new Condominium Property Act allowed a two-year window to amend condo plans this way, although this option is no longer available. Most common in older townhouse developments, but possible anywhere, this means you’d pay personally to replace double-paned windows that have lost their seal, or patio sliders that are worn out. That’s okay, although I’m not a fan of this amendment in high-rise buildings.

Don’t be scared of your condominium plan. Write and highlight interpretive notes all over it. After all, a replacement only costs $3! Become familiar and better understand your condo community. Oh, and correct ANYONE who refers to a “unit number” when they’re stating a civic suite number.   CL


Gerald Rotering  is a condominium-specialist Realtor with Realty Executives, Chinook City, is President of his own building’s condominium corporation, and is a professional member of the Canadian Condominium Institute.
Extensive further information about condominiums can be found on his web site: http://www.CondosInCalgary.com.