By Ernie Nyitrai Director, YRCC # 636
Ownership
Do You Really Own Your Gatehouse? Have All Your Common Elements Been Properly Transferred to the Corporation During the Turnover Process?
A Little Background First Our condo shares a common gatehouse, driveway, and a number of garden beds with our sister condo. The costs for these common elements are shared 50/50 between the condos. Our sister condo was built around 30 years ago and our building 2 years later. We have been sharing these costs ever since our condo was built.
Although we do not have a formal shared facilities committee, both boards meet at least 4 times a year to discuss issues concerning these shared common elements. This procedure has worked very well for both boards. This article outlines how we found out the gatehouse shared by the two condos for 30 years was not owned by either of the condos. During one of our joint facilities meetings we discussed the upcoming renewal of our corporation insurance coverage. We noted that if one of the many delivery and/or moving trucks entering our property hit the gatehouse requiring our corporations to replace/repair it, we would probably have to pay for these repairs or replacement ourselves since our insurance deductible is quite high. Therefore we wondered if we might be able to get a separate insurance policy for the gatehouse and have our insurance carrier pay for these damages, less the deductible. We thought that this separate
coverage would carry its own deductible which presumably would be lower than the combined deductibles for our two condos. In the process of collecting all the pertinent information for our insurer, we reviewed the plan of survey to see how the gatehouse was identified on this plan. We then went to the registry office and were informed that the gatehouse was not identified as being owned by our condo corporation. Since our sister building was built first, we thought that it might be owned by them. It was not. Therefore neither of us owned the gatehouse. The gatehouse was still owned by the original builder of the condos. This was even though our two condos were using it – and paying the costs of operating it for nearly 30 years. To further complicate matters, we found that the builder was no longer in business. Now What Do We Do? We contacted our corporations’ lawyers CONDOVOICE WINTER 2017
CV
25
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER
This is not a facetious question. This can be a real problem for your condo, much like it was for ours. Although the focus of this article is about a gatehouse, this question could easily also apply to your community centre (if you have one for your exclusive use), an off-site parking location (if exclusively for the use of the condo), a parking garage (if built for the exclusive use of the condo, an outdoor swimming pool (if the pool is identified as a lot on the corporation’s plan of survey), etc. Issues arise when a condo’s builder/developer fails to assign any one of these common elements over to your corporation during the turnover process. This happened to us.