This one is for the strata councils, property managers, and depreciation-report consultants who are figuring out who to hire. Most of you have already learned the hard way that the cheapest bid is rarely the cheapest job. The questions below are the ones I'd ask if I were on the other side of the table.
Before we start, a disclosure: for the spring side of the job — the individual garage doors on townhouse units — I'm one of the contractors you'd be asking. I'm fine with that. If my answers don't satisfy you, hire someone else. We don't do shared parkade gates or commercial doors; for those, put these same questions to a commercial door company. The right contractor passes this list. The wrong one doesn't.
Why strata garage doors are different
Three reasons.
- Cycle counts can be 10x to 30x a single house. A 40-unit townhouse complex with a shared parkade door sees 40,000+ cycles a year on that one door. That would put a residential 10,000-cycle spring through its whole life in about three months.
- Responsibility is murky. Is the door common property, limited common property, or part of the strata lot? The answer — and your bylaws — determine who pays. If you don't know going in, you'll fight about it after.
- The BC Strata Property Act puts obligations on the council that don't apply to single-family homes: depreciation reports, contingency reserve fund contributions, 3/4 votes for special levies. The contractor needs to know these exist.
The ten questions
1. Do you hold a business licence and enough insurance for strata work?
Garage door work isn't a certified trade in BC, so "licensed" means a municipal business licence — ask for it. Then insurance: most residential garage door companies carry $2M general liability. That's fine for a house. For a strata, you want $5M minimum. Ask for the certificate of insurance (COI) with the strata corporation named as additional insured. If they hesitate, end the call.
2. Are your technicians employees or subcontractors?
WorkSafeBC coverage follows the employer. If the tech is an unregistered subcontractor and gets hurt on your property, the claim can land at the strata's feet. The clean answer is employees of a company registered with WorkSafeBC. Ask for a WorkSafeBC clearance letter dated within the last 30 days.
3. What's your response time guarantee for a non-functional garage door?
If a 40-unit parkade door fails and 40 cars can't get out at 7 a.m., the response time is the only thing that matters. "We'll be there sometime today" is not an answer. A real number, in writing, with a contract penalty for missing it. We send the closest tech, which usually means 12 to 18 minutes anywhere in our service area. If the contractor lives in Abbotsford and your building is in Yaletown, that math doesn't work.
4. Will you provide a quoted price before the work, or do you bill time-and-materials?
Time-and-materials is how the cheap bid becomes the expensive bid. A reputable strata contractor will quote a flat rate for known work and a clear hourly for unforeseen scope, with a maximum before stop-and-call-the-council. Get both numbers in writing.
5. What's your spring spec for a high-cycle door?
If they say "10,000-cycle, that's what we always use" — wrong answer for strata. Minimum spec for a shared parkade door is 25,000-cycle. Better is 50,000-cycle commercial. A contractor who tries to install residential-grade springs in a strata application is either underbidding deliberately or doesn't know the spec. Either way, not your contractor.
6. Do you carry parts inventory, or is everything ordered after diagnosis?
A real strata contractor stocks the common parts your building's doors use — high-cycle springs, cables, rollers — so a failure is a same-day fix. "We have to order it" means three to fourteen days of a broken door and a hundred angry owners. The right answer is "yes, we carry those on the truck."
7. How do you handle limited-common vs common property repairs?
If a unit owner's individual garage door fails, the strata may or may not pay — it depends on how the door is designated and what your bylaws say. The contractor should bill the right party — the strata or the owner — without you having to micromanage it. Sloppy billing is how strata councils end up arguing with their own contractor in front of unit owners.
8. Have you worked with a depreciation report for garage doors before?
Under the Strata Property Act, BC stratas with five or more lots must get a depreciation report every five years. Garage doors are capital items in that report. Your contractor should know what gets listed (door panels, openers, springs, tracks, sensors) and what useful-life numbers are reasonable. If they've never read one, they don't know what the council is working under.
9. Will you participate in the depreciation report update or annual maintenance schedule?
Some councils want their door contractor to walk through with the depreciation consultant. Some want a quarterly written maintenance report. Some want both. A real contractor says "yes, here's the fee, here's the cadence." A sketchy one says "we just service when called."
10. What happens if your work fails?
Look for a two-year labour warranty, minimum, on strata work. If a spring they installed fails inside the warranty window, the re-service should be free. If the labour warranty is shorter than two years, ask why. The answer you want is "it isn't — two years is our standard."
The cautionary tale
This one's a real story, so I've changed the name and I'm keeping the details vague enough that nobody's identifiable. Call her Hilary, strata president.
Hilary's 32-unit townhouse complex in Burquitlam — 2010 build, you can see where this is going — had a shared parkade door with builder-grade 10,000-cycle springs. The springs failed in March 2023. Hilary's previous council had signed a maintenance contract with a low-bid contractor who installed residential-grade springs the first time. They failed again in June. They failed again in October.
By the time Hilary called me, the council had spent $4,800 on three failed installs and the parkade door was propped up with a 2x4 while 32 units took turns parking inside. The contractor had stopped returning calls. The strata management firm was "working on it."
A parkade door is commercial work, so it isn't a job we take. I gave her the name of a commercial door company I trust and walked her through these questions before she called them. They swapped to 25,000-cycle commercial-grade springs with sealed bearings, replaced the cables properly, and balanced the door to spec. Total: $2,400, one visit, two hours. The strata spent $4,800 to learn the lesson, then $2,400 more to actually fix it. That's the cost of asking the wrong contractor the wrong questions.
The depreciation report update later that year reclassified the door from "residential" to "high-cycle commercial," which changed the contingency reserve allocation by $1,200 a year going forward. The questions on this page would have caught all of it on the original bid.
The honest version
Strata councils are unpaid volunteers running a small corporation in their spare time. The Strata Property Act expects you to know procurement law on top of bylaw enforcement on top of insurance renewals on top of your day job. You can't be experts in every trade. The ten questions above are the cheat sheet so you don't have to be.
If you're on a council and you're putting a garage door contract out for bid, copy these questions into your RFP and watch which bidders flinch. The ones who don't flinch are the ones to interview. The door doesn't lie, and neither does a clean COI.
If your complex has individual townhouse garage doors and you want a spring specialist on the shortlist, call me. For the parkade gate, take this list to a commercial door company.