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Kamloops, BC
If you own a unit in a Kamloops strata, the roof above you is almost certainly not yours to fix. The City knows this, and its permit process has a requirement written specifically for it.
Most roofing content written for Kamloops treats every building as a house with one owner. Strata property does not work that way, and the City’s permit process reflects that directly.
City of Kamloops — Bulletin No. 23-01, “When Building Permits Are Required”
Work within a strata building or mobile home park will require written verification from the strata or park manager.City of Kamloops Bulletin No. 23-01, April 2023, revised April 2025, issued under Building Bylaw No. 11-84 and the BC Building Code 2024. This sits alongside the general requirement that only the owner, or an agent with a signed Owners Authorization Form, may apply.
Read that alongside the ordinary rule — only the owner, or an agent with a signed Owners Authorization Form, can apply — and the effect is a double lock. On permitted work the application needs owner-side authority and written verification from the manager. Neither an individual unit owner nor a contractor acting on their own initiative gets past it.
Note the bulletin’s scope: it says strata building or mobile home park, and manager or park manager. Kamloops has a substantial number of manufactured-home parks, and the same authorisation requirement reaches them. If you own a home in a park and the roof above it needs permitted work, the park manager’s written verification is part of the application in the same way a strata manager’s is.
This is not bureaucratic friction for its own sake. It is the City declining to authorise structural work on a building when the person asking may not have the standing to commission it. Which is the real subject of this page: on a strata, the hard question is not what the roof needs. It is who is allowed to decide.
On almost every strata in Kamloops — apartment, townhouse, or a complex of several buildings — the roof is common property. It is owned collectively by the strata corporation rather than by the owner of whichever unit sits beneath it.
Three consequences follow, and they surprise people in the same order every time.
The person with the wet ceiling is not the client. An owner watching a stain spread across their bedroom ceiling has a very direct problem and very little direct authority over the thing causing it. The roofer’s client is the strata corporation. That is frustrating and it is also the correct arrangement, because the alternative is individual owners commissioning uncoordinated work on a shared assembly.
The money is collective and it is already accounted for. Roof replacement is paid from what owners have contributed through fees and the contingency reserve, topped up by a special levy where the reserve falls short. How that decision gets made is governed by the Strata Property Act and by the strata’s own bylaws rather than by anything on this page, which is why a roof project and a funding decision are frequently the same conversation held twice.
Timelines are governance timelines, not trade timelines. A house can go from “this roof is done” to a signed quote in a fortnight. A strata goes through condition assessment, budget, a meeting, and often a vote. That process is measured in months, and it runs at its own pace regardless of what the weather is doing.
The single most useful thing a Kamloops strata council can have when the roof comes up is a current, credible picture of what the roofs actually are: age, assembly, condition, exposure, and a reasoned estimate of remaining life for each building.
Depreciation reporting exists to serve exactly this. Its weakness, in practice, is that the roof line in a report several years old is an estimate made at a distance, and estimates about roofs age badly. A council planning real expenditure wants that line refreshed by someone who has been on the roofs recently.
That is what an independent written condition report is for, and on a strata it does specific work that a contractor’s quote cannot:
Multi-building stratas almost always do roofs in phases. Several buildings, built at the same time, in the same weather, are nonetheless not in the same condition — and in Kamloops the reason is frequently exposure rather than age.
Sun does not fall evenly on a complex. A south-facing plane on the building at the top of the site takes a different ultraviolet and thermal load than a north-facing plane shaded by the building next to it, and over twenty years those two roofs are not the same roof. A complex spread across a hillside can additionally sit across a meaningful elevation difference, which changes how long snow stays on it. This is why a blanket “the complex is twenty-two years old, replace everything” is usually both too much and too little at once.
For an individual owner the practical consequence is that your building’s turn is a scheduling fact you do not control, and the useful thing to do about it is make sure the condition of your building is actually in the report the order was built from.
This is the situation that brings most owners to a page like this, and the sequence matters because doing it out of order costs people money.
Report it in writing, immediately, to the manager and the council. Not a phone call. Written notice with a date on it is what establishes when the corporation knew, and that timing matters later if there is any argument about damage.
Photograph it, with dates, as it develops. Same discipline as any damage claim. The stain today and the stain in a fortnight are two different pieces of evidence.
Mitigate inside your own unit. Buckets, moved furniture, protected flooring. Your unit’s interior is yours, and failing to limit obvious damage is the one thing that can genuinely be held against an owner.
Do not commission work on the roof yourself. It is common property. Privately arranged repairs to it can be unauthorised, may not be reimbursed, and can complicate the corporation’s insurance position.
Expect the search to take longer than you think it should. Water entering a roof assembly travels before it appears, so the entry point is rarely above the stain — and on a strata it can be above a neighbour’s unit entirely. That is how leak tracing actually works, and it is worth understanding before concluding that nobody is trying.
If the corporation is genuinely not acting and damage is continuing, that is the point at which an owner should get independent advice about the remedies available under the Strata Property Act. That is a legal question rather than a roofing one, and this site is not the place for the answer.
Councils, strata managers and owners — tell us about the buildings and we’ll pass it to a local Kamloops roofing company.
Generally no, and it can create a problem rather than solve one. On almost every strata the roof is common property, which means it belongs to the strata corporation rather than to the owner of the unit beneath it. Work commissioned privately on common property can be unauthorised, may not be reimbursed, and can complicate an insurance position later. The route is through the strata corporation, and if the response is too slow for an active leak there is a sequence for that further down this page.
Written verification from the strata manager. That is a requirement the City states specifically for strata work, in addition to the ordinary rule that only the owner or an authorised agent may apply. It means that on permitted work no individual owner and no contractor can put the application in on their own initiative. If a contractor tells a strata council the paperwork is handled, the council should ask to see the verification that was provided.
The strata corporation does, drawing on the money owners have already contributed through fees and the contingency reserve, and topping it up through a special levy when the reserve does not cover the work. Which of those applies is decided by the ownership under the Strata Property Act and the strata’s bylaws, not by the roofing contractor and not by the manager. Confirm the process for your own strata with your manager or the Act itself. The practical consequence for an owner is that the timing of a roof project and the timing of a levy tend to be the same conversation.
Report it in writing immediately, to both the strata manager and the council, and keep the copy. Photograph the damage with dates. Mitigate inside your own unit — buckets, moving belongings, protecting flooring — because that much is yours to do and failing to do it can be held against you. What you generally should not do is commission repairs to common property yourself and send the bill. If nothing moves and damage is continuing, that is the point to get independent advice about the remedies available to an owner.
Because a multi-building strata is several roofs of different ages and exposures under one ownership, and doing them all at once is rarely affordable or necessary. Phasing is normal and usually sensible. What matters is that the order has a stated basis — condition, remaining life, exposure — rather than being decided by which building complained loudest. A written condition report across all the buildings is what turns that from an argument into a plan.
The permit requirement is the same, and in both cases the roof is usually common property. What differs is how visible the work is to each owner and how the areas immediately around a roof are designated. Some parts of a townhouse complex may be limited common property, assigned to the exclusive use of one unit, and that designation can change who is responsible for what. The strata plan and the bylaws are the documents that settle it for a specific complex.