Three envelopes come back from tender. One says $1.74 million, one says $1.82 million, one says $2.05 million. The council meeting that follows is usually a forty-minute conversation about the lowest number, and it is usually the wrong conversation. On those three bids, the totals are the least reliable figures on the page.
If your council is working out how to choose an exterior contractor for a strata building, price matters, but it comes late. What decides whether the project finishes anywhere near the approved levy is what sits underneath the number: the unit rates, the named people, the insurance paperwork, and how the contractor plans to run a job with sixty or ninety households living inside it.
How do you choose an exterior contractor for a strata building in BC?
Shortlist three to five contractors who have completed envelope work on buildings of your type and age. Verify WorkSafeBC standing with a clearance letter, confirm at least $5 million in commercial general liability, and call property managers from comparable jobs. Compare bids on unit rates and exclusions, not totals. Interview the site superintendent who will run your project, and sign a stipulated-price contract administered by your building envelope consultant.
That is the short version. The rest of this article is about where councils go wrong on each step, because most of the damage happens between "we got three bids" and "we signed."
Hire the consultant before you call a single contractor
This is the counterintuitive part. The most useful thing a council can do before choosing a contractor is to not talk to contractors yet.
A building envelope consultant is a registered engineer or architect who assesses the building, writes the repair specification and drawings, runs the tender, and reviews the work in the field during construction. On a full rehabilitation, their fees commonly run 8 to 12 percent of construction value. Councils balk at that line, and some contractors will happily offer to design the fix for free.
Here is why that offer costs more than it saves. Without one specification, three contractors bid three different jobs. One prices full sheathing replacement on the north elevation, one prices "repair as required," one excludes it. You cannot compare those numbers, and the council ends up choosing on the total because the total is the only thing that looks comparable.
There is also a code reason. Buildings over three storeys or over 600 square metres in footprint fall under Part 3 of the BC Building Code, and the building permit for a re-clad needs letters of assurance from registered professionals. In the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Building By-law applies instead, with the same practical result. You will need a consultant for the permit anyway. Hiring one before the tender means the permit drawings and the bid documents are the same drawings.
For smaller Part 9 strata, a townhouse complex with a repair scope under roughly $250,000, a design-build arrangement with one contractor can work. Above that, get the consultant first.
Build the shortlist from finished buildings
The best source for a strata exterior contractor shortlist is not a search result. It is your property management company's portfolio. Ask which contractors have completed envelope or re-cladding projects on their other buildings in the last five years, and which of those they would put in front of a council again.
Filter on three things:
- Construction type. A contractor who does concrete high-rise restoration from swing stages is running a different business from one who re-clads four-storey wood-frame buildings from scaffolding.
- Building era. The 1985 to 1999 face-sealed stucco buildings across Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam and the North Shore have their own failure patterns. You want someone who has opened those walls before.
- Occupied buildings. Almost every strata project runs with residents at home. A contractor whose experience is mostly new construction has never had to manage that.
Keep the invited list to three to five. Councils assume more bidders means better pricing. In practice, experienced contractors decline tenders with eight bidders, because a detailed estimate on a strata envelope project takes a week or more of estimator time, and a one-in-eight chance does not justify it. A long list tends to attract the firms with the least work on their books. Pre-qualification through the consultant usually takes two to three weeks.
The paperwork that screens out half the field
Before a bid is opened, every contractor on the list should clear these checks. None of them is optional on a strata job.
WorkSafeBC clearance letter. It is free, it is online, and it confirms the contractor is registered and current on premiums. If you hire a contractor who is not in good standing, the strata corporation can be held liable for their unpaid premiums on your job. Pull one at tender, before the first progress payment, and again before the final payment.
Commercial general liability. $5 million per occurrence is the common floor for multi-family work, with the strata corporation named as an additional insured. Ask for a certificate issued by the broker, not a photocopy from the contractor's files. Expired policies turn up more often than you would expect. Tell your strata's own insurer about the project too, since section 149 of the Strata Property Act makes the strata responsible for insuring the building at full replacement value, construction period included.
Bonding. On larger projects, consultants typically specify a performance bond and a labour and material payment bond, each at 50 percent of the contract price. The bond premium is roughly one percent of the contract. A contractor who cannot obtain bonding at that size is telling you something about their balance sheet.
Business licence and safety program. Check the municipal business licence, or an Inter-Municipal Business Licence if the contractor works across several Metro Vancouver municipalities. A Certificate of Recognition (COR) from the BC Construction Safety Alliance is a good sign. At minimum, ask to see the fall protection plan they would use on your scaffold.
Read the bid, not the total
This is the mistake we see most often: the council ranks bids by total, eliminates the highest, and interviews the two lowest. It feels prudent. It ignores how envelope projects actually get paid for.
Every strata envelope job has hidden quantities. The consultant's test openings estimate how much sheathing is rotted, how many studs need replacing, how many windows fail. The tender carries a provisional quantity for each and asks for a unit rate. When the walls come open, the real quantity is almost always different, and the unit rate decides what the difference costs.
Take two bids shaped like this. Bid A is $1.74 million with sheathing replacement at $38 per square foot. Bid B is $1.82 million at $19 per square foot. The tender assumed 3,000 square feet of sheathing. The walls open and it is 9,000. Bid A grows by $228,000 to $1.97 million. Bid B grows by $114,000 to $1.93 million. The low bid is now the expensive one, and the council approved its levy on the wrong number.
When you read bids, put these side by side:
- Unit rates for sheathing, framing repair, window replacement and membrane work
- Exclusions, especially permits, hazardous materials testing (asbestos in older stucco and drywall mud), landscaping restoration and balcony membranes
- Allowances and provisional sums, and whether they match across bids
- The schedule of values, since a heavily front-loaded payment schedule leaves the strata with little bargaining power later in the job
- The proposed duration and crew size
Your consultant should produce a bid comparison that does this. If the comparison you receive only lists totals, ask for the rest.
Meet the person who will actually run your job
A company does not build your exterior. A site superintendent does, with a project manager behind them. Interview your top two or three bidders for 60 to 90 minutes each, and make it a condition that the superintendent and project manager named in the bid attend.
Questions that separate contractors who have worked on occupied strata buildings from those who have not:
- How many other projects will the superintendent run while yours is on?
- How do you notify residents before balcony and window work? (Standard Bylaw 7 requires at least 48 hours' written notice to enter a strata lot, except in an emergency.)
- What happens to a ground-floor suite's privacy and daylight when the scaffold and poly go up, and for how long?
- Who answers a resident complaint at 7:30 a.m., which is when construction-noise hours begin in Vancouver on weekdays?
- What did you do on your last project when the walls opened up worse than the test openings suggested?
That last question matters most. A good answer names a specific building, a specific quantity, and how the change order was priced.
When you call references, call the property manager on the reference job rather than the council president. Ask two things: what was the final cost against the contract price, and would they hire this contractor again. Then ask the contractor for one reference from a job that went badly. The ones worth hiring will give you one, and how they describe it will tell you more than any of their good references.
Contract terms that protect the levy
Most strata envelope projects in BC run on a CCDC 2 stipulated-price contract, with the envelope consultant acting as payment certifier. A few terms deserve attention before anyone signs.
Holdback. The Builders Lien Act requires the strata to retain 10 percent of each payment for 55 days after the certificate of completion. It protects the strata against liens from unpaid subcontractors and suppliers. Do not let anyone talk you out of it.
Change order pricing. Agree the overhead and profit markup on changes in the contract itself, not after the first change arrives. Ten to fifteen percent is a common range.
Contingency. Keep a 10 to 15 percent contingency in the strata's hands, outside the contract price, and write it into the levy resolution. We covered the vote mechanics in our piece on getting owner approval for a strata exterior renovation.
Warranty. CCDC 2's standard warranty is one year from substantial performance. Ask what workmanship warranty the contractor gives beyond that, and make sure it is written into the contract rather than printed in a brochure. Manufacturer warranties on membranes and coatings are separate and usually depend on installation by trained crews, so confirm the contractor is approved for the specified system.
On a typical 60-unit wood-frame re-clad in Metro Vancouver, expect six to nine months on site. A contractor who promises much less for that scope has either missed something in the drawings or is planning to add crews they do not have yet.
What a strata exterior contractor should bring to the table
MV Construction has spent more than ten years on building envelope work and exterior renovation across Greater Vancouver and Vancouver Island, most of it on strata and multi-family buildings that stayed occupied throughout. We are licensed and WCB-insured, and our workmanship is backed by written warranty. When we bid to a consultant's specification, we show our unit rates, name the superintendent who will be on site, and price the scope at tender rather than recovering it later through change orders. A council that gets surprised mid-project does not call us for the next building, and the next building is most of our work.
The housing stock here keeps this question coming back. Much of the wood-frame strata built across the region between the mid-1980s and 1999 was face-sealed and sits in 1,200 to 1,800 millimetres of annual rain. Many of those councils are now on their second envelope decision, and the contractor they choose will be on site longer than most council members serve on council.
If your council is about to tender, or is looking at three bids that do not line up, we are happy to walk through the scope with you. Call (778) 375-5672 or request a fixed-scope estimate. If the project goes beyond the envelope into a full exterior renovation, we can price the whole assembly as one contract.
