The Condo and Townhouse Maintenance Checklist for New BC Owners

Nobody hands you a manual when you close on a condo. You get keys, a stack of strata bylaws you probably skimmed once, and a building that now depends partly on you to keep working. The question we hear most in the first few months is simple: what's actually mine to maintain, and what's the strata's job?

The short answer is that the strata maintains common property, and you maintain your own strata lot (Province of BC). The longer answer has a gray zone in the middle, and a Fraser Valley wet-coast climate that makes a few tasks matter more here than they would somewhere drier.

The basic split: your unit vs the building

Under BC's Strata Property Act, the default rule is straightforward. The strata corporation repairs and maintains common property, the parts of the building shared by everyone, roof, structure, elevators, hallways, exterior walls in most conventional strata buildings. You repair and maintain your own strata lot, which generally means everything inside the boundaries of your unit.

That covers the obvious stuff: your appliances, your in-suite plumbing fixtures, your flooring, your smoke detector. It gets less obvious fast. Limited common property, a deck, patio, or parking stall assigned to your unit for exclusive use, is technically still common property, but BC's standard bylaws often split responsibility for it: the strata typically handles structural repairs and anything infrequent, while day-to-day upkeep, sweeping the deck, keeping a patio drain clear, tends to fall to the owner using it.

The only way to know for certain in your specific building is to read the bylaws, not assume they match the standard template. Stratas frequently customize these sections, and a building two blocks away can split responsibility differently than yours does.

What's on you every month

A handful of tasks are entirely your job, regardless of what building you're in. If your unit has its own furnace, heat pump, or HVAC system, changing the filter every one to three months keeps it running efficiently and matters for indoor air quality, especially with pets in the unit. Testing your smoke detector monthly and swapping the battery annually is your responsibility even in a building with a full fire-alarm and sprinkler system, since the individual unit detector is treated as part of your strata lot.

Checking under sinks and around toilets for slow leaks is worth two minutes a month. A drip that seems trivial today is the kind of thing that, left unnoticed for months, causes damage to the unit below and lands you with a repair bill and possibly the strata's insurance deductible, the exact scenario we walk through in our condo insurance guide.

If your unit has a gas fireplace, gas range, or an attached garage, a carbon monoxide detector matters as much as the smoke detector does, and the same monthly test and annual battery habit applies. Units without any gas appliances or an attached garage carry lower CO risk, but it's worth confirming your specific unit's setup rather than assuming either way.

What matters more here than elsewhere: water

The Fraser Valley gets most of its annual precipitation between October and March (BC Climate Change Adaptation Program), and that seasonal pattern should shape when you do certain checks. A gutter or downspout that's been fine all summer can back up the first time a real fall rain hits, and if that gutter is your responsibility, either because it's attached to a townhouse you own outright or because your bare-land strata bylaws put exterior upkeep on owners, catching it in September beats discovering it in a November leak.

Deck and balcony drains deserve the same seasonal attention. Leaves and debris collect over summer without anyone noticing because nothing's draining through them yet. The first heavy October rain finds out fast. If your unit has a deck or patio, a five-minute clear-out before the wet season starts is cheap insurance against water finding its way somewhere it shouldn't.

Bathroom and kitchen ventilation matters more in a climate that's damp for half the year too. Poor airflow after a shower, combined with a mild, wet winter, is a common contributor to condensation and mildew in coastal BC units. Running the fan a few extra minutes after a shower and wiping down damp surfaces is a small habit that avoids a bigger problem.

Bare-land strata townhouses carry more of this

If you own a townhouse in a bare-land strata rather than a conventional one, the maintenance split shifts. Bare-land stratas typically insure and maintain less of each individual building than a conventional strata does, sometimes only shared common structures and land, which means exterior maintenance that a conventional condo owner would never think about, caulking, exterior paint touch-ups, sometimes roof-adjacent upkeep, can fall to you instead.

We cover the practical ownership difference in our bare-land vs conventional strata guide. If you're not sure which structure your building uses, it's worth confirming before you assume your maintenance list looks like a condo owner's.

What the strata's maintenance costs you indirectly

Even the tasks that aren't your job cost you something, just indirectly, through strata fees. Roof replacements, elevator servicing, envelope repairs, boiler maintenance in older buildings, all of it flows through the strata's operating budget and reserve fund, funded by the monthly fees every owner pays. When you're comparing two buildings with different fee levels, part of what you're comparing is how much preventive maintenance each strata actually does.

A building with a lower monthly fee isn't automatically the better deal. Sometimes it means a leaner, well-run operation. Sometimes it means deferred maintenance that's building toward a special levy down the road. The depreciation report is where that distinction actually shows up, not the fee number by itself, which is one more reason to read it rather than shop on the monthly number alone.

We've walked buyers through buildings where the fee looked great on paper and the reserve fund told a completely different story, a roof nearing the end of its life with barely enough saved to cover a third of the replacement cost. That gap eventually gets filled one of two ways: a fee increase at the next AGM, or a special levy. Neither shows up in the listing.

A season-by-season starting checklist

• Spring: once the wet season eases, check anything that took a beating over winter, caulking around windows and doors, deck surfaces for winter damage, and HVAC filters that likely need changing after a heavier winter workload.
• Summer: the low-maintenance stretch in this climate, and the easiest time to do anything exterior-facing before the fall rains return, gutter clearing, deck drain checks, and a look at weatherstripping on doors and windows.
• Fall: the highest-priority season here. Clear gutters and downspouts before the rain ramps up in October, check deck and balcony drains, and have any in-suite furnace or heat pump serviced before you're relying on it daily. If you're still shopping and comparing units, the difference between baseboard heat and a heat pump changes both your monthly bill and what you maintain.
• Winter: stay on top of what fall didn't cover, watch for condensation, keep bathroom fans running after showers, and test smoke and carbon monoxide detectors while everyone's spending more time indoors with heat running.

None of these seasonal tasks needs to be complicated. A recurring fifteen-minute walkthrough four times a year, filter, detectors, drains, caulking, catches almost everything before it becomes a repair instead of a routine check. The buyers we see handle ownership most smoothly aren't the ones who do more work overall, they're the ones who spread a small amount of attention across the year instead of discovering problems all at once.

What we see go wrong most often

The pattern we run into most isn't dramatic negligence. It's small tasks that quietly get skipped because nobody explained they were the owner's job in the first place. A first-time buyer moves in, assumes "the strata handles the building" covers more than it actually does, and the in-suite furnace filter goes eighteen months without a change. The system still works, technically, it's just working harder than it needs to and the air quality has been quietly worse the whole time.

The same pattern shows up with smoke detectors. A building has a full fire-alarm and sprinkler system, so a new owner assumes their individual unit detector is somebody else's concern. It isn't. And the gap only becomes obvious at the worst possible moment, when a detector that's been silently dead for a year doesn't go off.

None of these are expensive fixes. A furnace filter is a few dollars. A smoke detector battery is less than that. The cost isn't the money, it's the small window where something that should have been routine turns into something that wasn't caught in time.

Where a depreciation report fits in

None of your in-suite tasks replace reading the building's depreciation report before you buy, which projects when the strata's major systems, roof, envelope, elevators, will need work and how the reserve fund is tracking against that. Our strata depreciation report guide walks through how to read one. Your monthly filter change and their twenty-year roof plan are two different maintenance clocks, and a well-run building keeps both running.

What we'd tell a friend who just closed

Read your specific bylaws' repair and maintenance sections in the first month, not the fifth. Set a recurring reminder for filter changes and smoke detector tests, since the buyers who stay on top of these small things are consistently the ones who don't get blindsided later. And if you're not sure whether something is yours or the strata's, ask the strata manager before you either ignore it or pay for something that was never your job.

Sources

• Province of British Columbia, Paying for repair and maintenance in stratas
• Strata Property Act, Standard Bylaws
• BC Climate Change Adaptation Program, Fraser Valley regional overview

Data sourced August 2026. Bylaws and maintenance responsibilities vary by building, confirm your specific strata's bylaws before assuming a task is or isn't yours.

Next Steps: Work with FRIVE

FRIVE is a Fraser Valley team helping first-time and move-up buyers understand what they're taking on, not just at closing, but in the years of ownership after. If you're weighing what a specific building's maintenance obligations actually look like before you buy, that's a question worth asking early.

Get in touch with the FRIVE team: book a 20-minute chat or browse current Fraser Valley listings.