Electrical planning reports for BC stratas

The deadlines

• December 31, 2026 for stratas in the Capital Regional District, Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
• December 31, 2028 for the rest of BC, including the Gulf Islands.
• New stratas get five years from the deposit of the strata plan.

What the report actually is

It is a written record of the electrical system your strata is responsible for, and what it can carry. The point of it is planning. If owners start adding EV chargers, heat pumps or anything else that draws real load, the strata needs to know what the existing infrastructure can take before it finds out the hard way.

It is a permanent record. There is no renewal requirement in the current regulation, and once you have it, it gets disclosed on the Form B.

Who needs one

Every strata corporation with five or more strata lots. That includes bare land stratas, townhouse stratas, condominium buildings and commercial stratas. The type of strata does not change the requirement.

If your strata had fewer than five lots as of December 31, 2023, you are exempt.

Who is allowed to write one

The regulation lists who counts as a qualified person, and it depends on the buildings in your strata.

If every building is Part 9, meaning not more than three storeys and not more than 600 square metres of footprint, which covers detached houses, duplexes and most townhouse blocks, a qualified person can be a professional engineer, a licensee engineer, an applied science technologist, a certified technician, or a journeyperson construction or industrial electrician.

If the strata has any Part 3 building, meaning anything larger, or any assembly, care or high hazard occupancy, the report has to come from an engineer or a technologist.

Our electricians hold Red Seal construction electrician certification, so we are qualified persons for Part 9 stratas. We are not engineers. If your strata has a Part 3 building in it, we will tell you that and point you to someone who can do it properly. It is worth asking anyone who quotes you which of these applies to your property, because the answer decides who is legally allowed to write your report.

The short form report

Where every strata lot is supplied with electricity by the utility independently of every other lot, the regulation allows a much shorter report. Bare land stratas often land here, because each house is usually fed straight from a utility owned transformer with its own meter, and the strata owns no electrical distribution of its own.

If that is your situation, there is far less to report on, and it costs less.

One thing to be careful about. Separate BC Hydro bills do not prove independent supply. Plenty of stratas assume they qualify because each owner gets their own bill, and then it turns out there is a strata owned transformer, vault, kiosk or meter centre somewhere on the property. That means a full report. The only way to know is for someone to walk the property and look.

We will not tell you which report you need until we have been there.

How we do it

We come out and walk the property. Every meter and service entrance, the transformer and its utility asset number, and anything between the transformer and the houses. We are looking for whether the strata owns any part of the distribution.

We make the determination on site, from what we find. Not from your say-so, and not from a photo. This matters more than it sounds. If a report concludes there is no shared electrical infrastructure because a council member signed a form saying so, the strata has taken on that judgment call itself. We put in writing what we verified, how, and on what date.

You get the report. It goes in your records permanently and gets disclosed on the Form B when a lot sells.

We also ask for your registered strata plan, your title, and your depreciation report if you have one, because a strata owned transformer would normally show up as a reserve component.

We are delivering reports now, ahead of the deadline rush, with a turnaround of under a week from the site visit.

What you get

A written report that states the determination and how we made it: what we verified on site, on what date, and from which documents. Photos of the meters and the transformer. A map of the strata with every lot boundary and the common property drawn on the aerial photo, so council can see exactly what the report covers. A plain description of how power reaches each lot. Your council files it and discloses it on the Form B when a lot sells.

What it costs

Every strata is different, so we quote per property. A short form report on a small bare land strata is a fraction of a full report. Send us your strata plan number and how many lots you have and we will come back with a quote.

Common questions