Significantly Unfair Financial Conduct by Strata Corporations

Trevor Morley
Jul 10
6 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

CAN A STRATA CHARGE OR RETAIN MONEY WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY?

A Strata cannot charge an Owner, or keep money it received, without a legal basis for doing so, and a pattern of unauthorized financial conduct is one of the most common ways a Strata ends up on the losing side of a significant-unfairness claim. Compliance with the Act's own cost-allocation formula is generally not significantly unfair (King Day Holdings Ltd. v. The Owners, Strata Plan LMS3851, 2020 BCCA 342), but that general rule protects a Strata only while it stays inside its actual authority: charging for a benefit an Owner never receives, changing a cost-sharing arrangement Owners relied on, or keeping money the Strata was never entitled to are all different ways of stepping outside it.

Most of these disputes reach the Civil Resolution Tribunal rather than a court. A Tribunal decision does not bind a future dispute the way a court decision does, but the pattern across a large number of Tribunal decisions is a useful, concrete guide to how this doctrine actually plays out for Owners and Stratas. The rest of this article works through several of them.

WHAT DOES "CHARGING FOR A BENEFIT AN OWNER DOESN'T RECEIVE" LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?

It looks like a Strata billing an Owner, through ordinary unit-entitlement fees, for a system that Owner's Strata Lot has no access to and pays separately to replicate. The Tribunal found this in C.2K Holdings Ltd. v. The Owners, Strata Plan K 577, 2018 BCCRT 236, where a commercial Owner was charged its unit-entitlement share of garbage collection, gas and electrical utilities, HVAC, and elevator expenses despite maintaining its own separate garbage pickup and utility systems and having no access to the residential elevator at all — the Tribunal found the disparity between what the Owner paid and what it actually used was decisive.

The Tribunal reached the same conclusion on very similar facts in Suter v. The Owners, Strata Plan EPS1699, 2024 BCCRT 1086: a strata billed all 69 Strata Lots for its geothermal heating and cooling system's operating costs, even though 25 units had no geothermal connection, no prospect of ever getting one, and paid separately for their own heating. The Tribunal drew a specific line here — an owner who gets some benefit from a shared system, even an unequal one, is generally still expected to pay their unit-entitlement share; it is zero benefit, permanently, that crosses into unfairness. The Tribunal applied the same reasoning in Rhodes v. The Owners, Strata Plan EPS 3573, 2026 BCCRT 990, ordering that chiller repair costs be allocated only to the 15 cooled units, not all 62 residential units, because the other 47 units could never be connected to the system.

Generalov v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS 2498, 2018 BCCRT 516, adds a related but distinct problem: after six years of treating landscaping as a shared common expense, an apartment-owner-controlled council shifted the cost onto the development's twelve townhouse owners alone, without amending the Bylaws and without giving those owners any choice to maintain their own yards more cheaply. The Tribunal found the sudden change violated the townhouse owners' reasonable expectation that the established practice would continue.

CAN A STRATA CHANGE A LONG-STANDING COST ARRANGEMENT WITHOUT WARNING?

Not without real risk, particularly where Owners have relied on the old arrangement for years. Our understanding is that a Strata's insistence on strict unit entitlement can itself be significantly unfair in exceptional circumstances, including where an established, long-relied-upon different allocation is unilaterally abandoned without a duly authorized resolution (King Day Holdings, 2020 BCCA 342). The Tribunal applied that same logic in Ahlfield v. The Owners, Strata Plan NW 3156, 2025 BCCRT 459: after thirty years of allocating expenses 24.82 percent to townhouses and 75.18 percent to apartments, the strata switched to unit entitlement, raising townhouse fees by 42 percent in a single year. The Tribunal ordered a return to the historical percentages, reasoning that thirty years of consistent practice, combined with a 73 percent apartment voting majority the townhouse owners could not outvote, made the change significantly unfair.

Gordon v. The Owners, Strata Plan EPS2300, 2026 BCCRT 654, shows the same problem arising even sooner: a developer represented to a commercial purchaser that its Strata Lots would bear 16 percent of common expenses, the strata followed that figure for two years, and then raised it to 21.45 percent. The Tribunal found the Owner's expectation, built on both the original representation and two years of consistent practice, made the 34 percent increase significantly unfair.

A related problem arises where the underlying numbers a Strata relies on are simply wrong. In Klassen v. The Owners, Strata Plan LMS 1710, 2022 BCCRT 705, the strata knew — it had obtained two legal opinions confirming it — that its filed Schedule of Unit Entitlement overstated one Owner's share by roughly 12 percent, tried and failed to secure the unanimous resolution needed to fix it, and kept billing the Owner on the inflated figure regardless. The Tribunal found continuing to charge a known-incorrect entitlement was significantly unfair, even though the strata had acted in good faith and had no unilateral power to correct the Schedule itself.

WHAT ABOUT CHARGES A STRATA NEVER PROPERLY DISCLOSED TO THE OWNER?

A Strata's failure to tell an Owner about a financial change before charging them for its consequences is treated seriously. In The Owners, Strata Plan EPS5579 v. Kwong, 2023 BCCRT 742, the strata raised its insurance deductible from $10,000 to $100,000, posted a notice about the increase on an online portal the Owner had never registered for, and then billed her the full $100,000 after a water-damage claim. The Tribunal found the portal posting did not satisfy the Strata's statutory duty to notify Owners of the change, and capped the Owner's liability at the old $10,000 deductible.

Hoyt v. The Owners, Strata Plan LMS 1802, 2026 BCCRT 82, is a more direct version of the same problem: a debt arose in July 2019, the strata did not tell the Owners about it until December 2022, did not explain how the amount was calculated until March 2023, and had in the meantime been charging interest retroactively back to 2019. The Tribunal found charging interest on a debt the Strata itself never disclosed or explained was, on its own, significantly unfair.

CAN A STRATA KEEP MONEY IT WAS NEVER ENTITLED TO?

No, and continuing to hold onto a payment after learning it was never properly owed tends to make a weak position into a significantly unfair one. In Xu v. The Owners, Strata Plan BCS 2012, 2022 BCCRT 1319, a strata imposed a chargeback with no Bylaw authority for it, let its own limitation period to pursue that chargeback expire, and then accepted a payment from the Owners' mortgage lender, who had mistakenly understood the strata's notice as a registered lien claim. Once the Owners explained the lender's mistake and the time bar, the strata still refused to return the money. The Tribunal found all three parts of that sequence — the unauthorized charge, the time-barred claim, and the refusal to give the money back once the mistake was known — independently supported a significant-unfairness finding.

A STRATA'S FINANCIAL DECISIONS MUST MATCH ITS ACTUAL LEGAL AUTHORITY

None of these Strata Corporations set out to act unfairly. Most followed a process, held a vote, or relied on the Act's own default unit-entitlement formula. However, a fair process and a technically compliant formula do not, on their own, authorize charging an Owner for something they do not benefit from, reversing a cost arrangement Owners have relied on for years, or holding onto money the Strata was never entitled to in the first place. A robust and resilient Strata Community keeps a close, current relationship between what it charges an Owner and what that Owner actually receives, and corrects the gap through a proper vote rather than by simply continuing to bill.