Quote:
Originally Posted by Tapioca
I've never been on strata myself, but usually it's 1 or 2 people that do something stupid which ruins it for everyone. When you're managing a multi-family complex with insurance to worry about, you can't always let people do things that may violate the insurance policy, compromise the integrity of the exterior, etc. Usually, small things which may go against the rules are ignored because they're risk-managed (e.g. Leaving tires at the end of your assigned parking spot in an underground parkade). However, someone does an oil change (which is against the rules) and doesn't clean up, then you can see how a strata council would come down hard on the rest of the owners. There's probably something in your bylaws about not being able to maintain mechanical vehicles on the common property. It's probably not a good idea to use jackstands, but you'll probably get away with engine work if you don't make a mess and don't impact the use of the parkade by others.
Usually, this is where becoming friends with the resident care-taker and council members goes a long way.
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I hate strata's with a passion.
In my building there is 12 extra storage lockers for rent, and a few extra parking stalls. These are all owned by the building, and the rent goes back into the pocket of the strata in order to offset our monthly maintenance costs.
The storage lockers range in size from small to medium and extremely large. Small are like the standard 4'x8' lockers, medium are slight larger 8'x8' or 8'x10', and then the large ones are actual individual rooms, which are as big as 400sf-600sf.
The small lockers rent for like 30 bucks, medium ones 70, and the large ones are like 110 bucks a month or some shit.
I have complained to my council numerous times about how cheap the rent is on these storage units, and how I rent a garage to store my stuff which is smaller than some of these units and it costs me 300 bucks a month. Not to mention I gotta get in my car and drive 8 blocks to get to it.
I told them I am willing to pay 300-400 bucks a month to rent one of the large units, but they say that the storage units are available on a first come first serve basis only. Well none of the people who rent these storage units has given one up in like 7 years, because they are so goddamn cheap.
The best part about this entire thing, 8 of the 12 storage lockers (and all 4 of the large ones) are rented to members who are on the council. So of course they won't raise the price on them, because it's just going to cost them more money.
It's a similar story with the parking stalls. To rent a parking stall off a member in the building, it costs like 80-100 bucks a month. The strata parking stalls are rented out for 25 bucks a month (guess who rents most of them).
The issue with my condo, is that many of the people are old, and they simply don't care, and don't pay attention at how the council is anally raping them.
I tried to go on the council, but they have voted for the exact same 8 muppets the last 5 years I have lived here. I have now given up and I don't even pay attention to them or the meetings anymore because I am convinced these people are fucking retarded, it's not worth the headache. No matter what I try to do, what reasonable action I call for, the people on council just huddle into their little senior citizen groups and make me look like I am just some punk asshole.
I went toe to toe with my strata council for 2 full years, but they can just keep delaying or deferring and I ended up just stressing over it so much and getting so angry at times, that it was just easier to let it go and let them do whatever they want to fuck me over.