Choosing a Maintenance Provider for Your Strata: The Complete Evaluation Checklist
How to evaluate and choose a strata maintenance provider. Insurance requirements, SLAs, contract terms, red flags, and a complete checklist for strata councils.
Hiring a maintenance provider for your strata corporation is one of the highest-stakes decisions your council will make. Get it right, and you have a partner that keeps your building in excellent condition, responds quickly to problems, and makes your job as a council member easier. Get it wrong, and you spend the next year chasing missed service calls, dealing with owner complaints, cleaning up substandard work, and eventually going through the painful process of firing a vendor and starting over.
The challenge is that most maintenance providers look similar on paper. They all have websites. They all say they serve strata corporations. They all promise quality and reliability. The difference between a genuinely capable provider and one that will let you down becomes apparent only after the contract is signed - unless you know exactly what to evaluate before you commit.
Start With Scope: What Do You Actually Need?
Before evaluating providers, define exactly what you are looking for. List every maintenance service your building requires across exterior maintenance (landscaping, snow removal, gutter cleaning, window cleaning, pressure washing, painting), interior and common area maintenance (hallway and lobby cleaning, elevator cab cleaning, parkade maintenance, lighting), building systems (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, fire safety, elevator), and seasonal services (irrigation management, fall cleanup, dryer vent cleaning).
Then decide whether you want a single provider covering multiple categories or separate specialists. The trend in strata maintenance is strongly toward consolidation. Fewer vendor relationships means less management burden for volunteer councils, volume pricing across services, consistent quality, simplified invoicing, and single-point accountability.
When defining your scope, think about your council's capacity. Every separate vendor requires management time. A volunteer council with limited time is almost always better served by fewer vendors covering broader scope than many narrow specialists.
The Evaluation Criteria
1. Insurance and Licensing
This is non-negotiable. Any provider working on your strata property must carry adequate insurance.
Required minimums:
- Commercial General Liability (CGL): $2 million minimum, $5 million recommended for larger buildings. Covers property damage and bodily injury caused by the provider's operations.
- Workers' Compensation (WorkSafeBC): Mandatory in BC. Without it, your strata corporation could be liable for worker injuries on your property.
- Commercial Auto Insurance: Required for any provider bringing vehicles or equipment onto your property.
Do not accept insurance certificates from the provider directly. Request that their insurance broker send certificates to your strata corporation. Ask to be named as an "additional insured" on their CGL policy, which extends coverage to claims arising from their work on your property.
Insurance coverage can lapse between certificate issuance and your contract start date. Include a contractual requirement that the provider maintain all required insurance throughout the term and notify you immediately if any policy is cancelled or reduced.
2. Experience With Strata Properties
Strata maintenance is fundamentally different from residential or general commercial work. Providers without strata experience often struggle with the governance structure (working with a council, not a single decision-maker), owner interactions, access logistics, bylaw compliance (noise restrictions, work hours), and documentation requirements.
Ask how many strata corporations they currently serve, the size range of those clients, how long they have been in the strata space, and for examples of buildings similar to yours.
3. References and Reputation
Request a minimum of three references from strata corporations similar to yours in size and type. Ask each reference these key questions:
- How long have you worked with this provider?
- How would you rate their reliability?
- How responsive are they to issues?
- Have you experienced significant problems? How were they resolved?
- Has quality been consistent over time?
- Would you hire them again if starting fresh?
- What do you wish they did differently?
The last two questions are the most revealing. Also check Google Reviews, ask your property management company for their experience, and check the Better Business Bureau.
4. Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Without SLAs, you have no objective basis for measuring performance or holding the provider accountable.
Essential SLAs:
- Emergency response: 1-2 hours for water leaks and safety hazards
- Urgent requests: 4-8 hours for broken fixtures and equipment malfunctions
- Routine requests: 24-48 hours for minor repairs and maintenance items
- Service completion rate: 95 percent or higher for scheduled services
- Communication standards: Confirmation of completed work, same-day issue notification, response to inquiries within one business day
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5. Staffing and Crew Quality
The provider's reputation means nothing if the people actually doing the work on your property are unskilled, unmotivated, or constantly changing. Ask whether you will have a dedicated crew or account manager assigned to your building, what their employee retention rate is, how they train new employees, whether they use subcontractors (and for which services), what background checks they perform on employees who will be working in your building, and whether crews are supervised on site or work unsupervised.
High employee turnover - above 40 percent annually - is one of the most reliable indicators of problems in a maintenance company. When staff constantly changes, quality suffers because new workers do not know your building's specific needs, systems, and quirks. They do not know which areas need extra attention, where access is tricky, or which building systems have known issues. This institutional knowledge takes months to build and is lost every time an employee leaves.
If the provider uses subcontractors for any services, find out whether those subcontractors carry their own insurance, whether the provider supervises their work, and whether you will see consistent subcontractor crews or different people each time.
6. Communication Systems
Pay attention to how the provider communicates during the evaluation process. If they are slow or disorganized while trying to win your business, expect worse after the contract is signed.
Good communication includes a dedicated point of contact, digital service tracking, proactive updates about upcoming work and schedule changes, documented service reports with photos, and responsive inquiry handling with clear escalation paths.
7. Pricing Structure
Common models:
- Fixed monthly fee: Simplest for budgeting. Best for routine, predictable services.
- Per-service pricing: More flexible but harder to budget.
- Hybrid: Fixed monthly for routine services, per-service for ad-hoc and emergency work. Most common for comprehensive contracts.
Look for detailed breakdowns by service category, clear inclusion and exclusion definitions, stated frequency assumptions, after-hours and emergency pricing, rate increase provisions, and volume discount tiers.
The lowball red flag: If one provider's pricing is 30 percent or more below competitors, be cautious. Abnormally low pricing almost always means cut corners on labor or insurance, underestimated scope with change orders coming later, or unsustainable pricing with major increases at renewal.
8. Contract Terms
Essential provisions:
- Term length: One year with renewal options is standard
- Termination for cause: 30 days notice for repeated SLA failures
- Termination for convenience: 60-90 days notice
- Scope modification process: For adding or removing services mid-contract
- Price escalation caps: 3-5 percent annually for multi-year contracts
- Liability and indemnification: Provider must indemnify the strata corporation for claims arising from their work
- Dispute resolution: Mediation before arbitration or litigation
9. Transition Planning
Switching providers is disruptive. A professional provider will have a structured transition plan covering property assessment and knowledge transfer, resident communication, key and access transfer, equipment and supply logistics, and service continuity to prevent gaps.
The best time to transition providers in the Okanagan is late spring (after snow season, before full landscaping) or early fall (before snow season). Avoid transitioning during peak winter or summer.
The Red Flags Checklist
Beyond evaluating positives, watch for these warning signs:
Operational: Cannot provide current proof of insurance. No written contracts. Reluctant to commit to SLAs. No strata references. High turnover. No dedicated point of contact. No digital tracking systems.
Financial: Pricing dramatically below market. Requires large upfront payments. No detailed pricing breakdown. Pushes multi-year contracts without performance exit clauses.
Communication: Slow response during the sales process. Inconsistent information from different people. Overpromises that seem too good to be true. Defensive about past problems or negative reviews.
When to Walk Away
Sometimes the best decision is not choosing any of the providers you have evaluated. If none of the candidates meet your minimum thresholds for insurance, experience, or communication quality, it is better to expand your search than to settle for a provider you have reservations about. The cost of a bad hire - in time, money, and building condition - far exceeds the cost of a longer search process.
Similarly, if a provider is unwilling to negotiate reasonable contract terms, refuses to commit to SLAs, or is evasive about references or insurance, these are not negotiation positions. They are disqualifying behaviors that predict how the provider will operate after the contract is signed.
Making the Decision
Use a weighted scoring matrix to compare providers objectively:
| Category | Weight |
|---|---|
| Insurance and licensing | 15% |
| Strata experience | 15% |
| References and reputation | 15% |
| SLAs and accountability | 15% |
| Staffing and crew quality | 10% |
| Communication systems | 10% |
| Pricing and value | 10% |
| Contract terms | 5% |
| Transition plan | 5% |
Score each provider from 1 to 5 in each category, multiply by weight, and compare totals. Present results to the full council with your recommendation, and document the decision-making process in council minutes to demonstrate objective governance.
After You Choose: The First 90 Days
Weeks 1-2: Complete the transition. Conduct a joint property walk-through. Confirm access arrangements. Distribute resident communication.
Weeks 3-4: Monitor the first full service cycle. Check quality against contracted standards. Provide immediate feedback.
Month 2: Conduct a formal 30-day review. Discuss what is working and what needs adjustment.
Month 3: Evaluate SLA compliance. Review service reports and documentation quality. Confirm billing matches contracted rates.
Ongoing: Monthly invoice and report review. Quarterly formal performance review. Annual comprehensive evaluation to decide on renewal, renegotiation, or a new search.
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Key Takeaways
- Define your maintenance scope before evaluating providers - you cannot compare proposals if providers are bidding on different scopes
- Insurance is non-negotiable: $2 million minimum CGL, WorkSafeBC coverage, and commercial auto insurance are baseline requirements
- Strata experience matters - providers without it often struggle with governance, access, and communication complexities
- Check a minimum of three references and ask "Would you hire them again?" and "What do you wish they did differently?"
- Require specific SLAs for response time, completion rate, and communication - without measurable commitments, there is no accountability
- Be cautious of pricing dramatically lower than competitors - cheap maintenance usually means cut corners or hidden charges
- Plan your transition carefully and time the switch during a low-activity period
- Use a weighted scoring matrix to compare providers objectively across all criteria, not just price
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