A water leak or other incident can on occasion damage apartment building condominium common property and one or more owners’ homes. The corporation, of course, will act quickly to address the cause of the damage, such as having a plumber in to repair the pin-hole leak in a hot-water line that serves various homes. A lesser response sometimes follows, though, for the homeowners left with damaged walls and ruined hardwood flooring in their suites.
Bluntly put, there’s no excuse for failure to repair condominium owners’ homes immediately after damage is done stemming from a common-property cause. Board members who are hesitant to spend the money need only ask themselves how they would feel if it were their homes that were damaged. Condo corporations cannot avoid responsibility to repair the common property and private property equally and quickly. The money must be spent, whether it comes from cash on hand, from an insurance claim or from a special assessment on all the owners.
Boards that try to avoid collective responsibility in these situations face a variety of repercussions, including upset homeowners, a divided condo community and possible lawsuit from owners seeking to recover the cost of repairs, to which they’ll rightly add the cost of legal help in pursuing their claims.
Condominium living is a collective undertaking with joint responsibility for all owners’ comfort, security and property values. The corporation, led and represented by its Board, cannot avoid its obligation to maintain the common property and to remedy problems, nor avoid its obligation to “make whole” owners whose homes are damaged through a cause not of those owners’ making.
This responsibility can be taken one step further in the case of damage to a suite caused by negligence or mechanical failure in another suite. Imagine that a dishwasher in a condo suite breaks down, flooding the suite below. While a condo corporation might leave it up to these two homeowners to sort out repairs and reimbursement, my advice is that the Board should ensure that the damaged suite is repaired at the corporation’s expense, and that the responsible suite is then billed. If that suite fails to pay, then the usual powerful collection procedures should be followed by the corporation to recover the debt, leaving no burden on the downstairs neighbour who has already been through enough, what with the damage and then the repair work.
My opinions on this issue are not legal advice, which might be more cautiously put. But I know what works in condominium living to keep suites safe, dry, and quickly repaired after damage is done.
Calgary Condominium Directory
