Depreciation Reports in BC: The Five-Year Rule and the 2026 Deadline

What a depreciation report actually is

A depreciation report inventories everything a strata corporation owns collectively, the roof, the building envelope, plumbing and electrical systems, elevators, roads, amenities, assesses the condition of each component, and projects what maintaining, repairing, and replacing all of it will cost over a 30-year span. It then models funding scenarios: how the contingency reserve fund could cover those costs through contributions, levies, or both.

For a buyer, that makes it the single most forward-looking document in the strata package. The Form B tells you what the building costs today. The depreciation report tells you what it will cost for the next decade, and whether the current owners have been saving for that or leaving it for you.

The rules that changed, and the deadline that just passed

For years, BC stratas could defer their depreciation report indefinitely with an annual 3/4 vote, and many did. That loophole is gone. Under the current provincial requirements:

• Every strata corporation with five or more lots, including bare land stratas, must obtain a depreciation report on a five-year cycle. Stratas with four or fewer lots are exempt.
• The deferral vote no longer exists. A strata cannot vote its way out of the report.
• Stratas with no report, or a report received before December 31, 2020, faced hard deadlines: July 1, 2026 for Metro Vancouver (excluding islands reachable only by boat or air), the Fraser Valley, and the Capital Regional District; July 1, 2027 for the rest of BC, including Bowen Island and the Southern Gulf Islands.
• New strata corporations must obtain their first report within two years of their first annual general meeting, tightening to 18 months from July 1, 2027.

The Fraser Valley deadline has now passed. Practically, that means every condo or townhouse complex of five or more lots that we show buyers around Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission, and Maple Ridge should have a report dated within the last five years, and it arrives in your document package because the strata must attach its most recent report to the Form B.

Who writes them now

Since July 1, 2025, depreciation reports must come from a designated professional. The province's list currently covers six groups: professional engineers and professional licensee engineers, architects and architectural technologists, applied science technologists and certified technicians, AACI-designated appraisers, certified reserve planners, and professional quantity surveyors. Before that change, anyone a strata considered qualified could write one, and quality varied accordingly.

For buyers this is quietly good news: reports written after mid-2025 carry a professional designation behind their cost projections. When you read an older report, weigh it a little more skeptically, and check whether the strata has a newer one on order.

How we read one in twenty minutes

Depreciation reports run long, often past a hundred pages. In our experience a buyer gets most of the value from three passes:

1. The next ten years. Find the component table and pull out everything scheduled for renewal within a decade: roof, envelope, windows, boilers, elevators, parkade membrane. These are the projects your fees or a levy will fund while you own the home.
2. The funding model. Every report models scenarios for how the reserve fund could meet those costs. Compare the scenario the strata actually follows (check the AGM minutes and budget) against the report's recommendations. A report that recommends substantially higher contributions than the strata is making is a gap you're buying into.
3. The report's own quality. Date, author, designation, and whether the inspection was recent. A current report by a designated professional that names real problems beats a glossy old one that found nothing.

Then hold the report against the monthly fee. A building whose fee funds the report's plan is priced honestly. A building whose fee ignores the plan has a second, invisible price, and the minutes usually show it forming.

What the report means for your offer

A depreciation report naming expensive work isn't automatically a reason to walk. Every building ages; concrete high-rises and wood-frame townhouses just age on different schedules. What the report changes is your information position. Named, priced, scheduled work with a funding plan is a known cost you can weigh, and sometimes negotiate around. Unnamed work in an unfunded building is the situation that produces the special levy stories.

Where the report interacts with money decisions, bring in the professionals: your mortgage broker on how a coming levy affects affordability, and your real estate lawyer on anything ambiguous in how the strata has handled the report's recommendations. If you're weighing two buildings, we're happy to read the reports alongside you, that comparison is one of the most useful conversations we have with buyers, and it's the reason our document review guide puts the report second in the reading order, right after the Form B.