Can strata townhouses be converted to rowhouses?
Question: I live in a 6 unit strata townhouse project in Victoria. I would be interested in learning more about the rules respecting townhouses that are not strata and whether we could convert our strata to a non strata (freehold?) row of townhouses. – Elizabeth
Answer: This question came in after the feature story I wrote about the possible arrival of freehold rowhouses in Vancouver, as a result of an amendment to provincial legislation that makes it easier to set up party-wall agreements for the life of the building.
I checked with Michael Geller, the development consultant who headed up the City of Vancouver’s roundtable on building forms, part of its task force on housing affordability. He echoed what I had heard from other developers when I researched my story on rowhouses, which is that there are more complications to creating freehold rowhouses than just the provincial regulations.
Michael said that, in theory, yes you could convert a strata to freehold rowhouses, provided the municipality would agree to subdivide the lot and provided each one of the current townhouses faces a city street. (Many strata townhouse developments currently being built don’t. They run the townhouses perpendicular to the street in order to create a small inner courtyard and also to maximize the density on the lot.)
In practice, however, he said there’s a lot more than that. He specifically mentioned (and I heard this one from many others) that the municipality would like insist on an individual water and sewer hook-up for each rowhouse. Stratas typically only have one hook-up. One article I read recently on laneway houses said a sewer/water hook-up costs $13,000 in Vancouver. Other munis would charge different prices, but I doubt the fees would be nominal for that.
As well, the townhouses in a strata might not meet the building code for fire separation that a freehold, or fee-simple, rowhouse would require.
Michael said if the whole complex burned down, you could probably rebuild it as fee-simple rowhouses with fewer complications. But assuming that’s not what anyone is planning for … a lot of hoops to jump through.
1 response so far ↓
1 Adam Fitch // Jul 6, 2012 at 5:38 pm
Frances, this was an interesting question, and an excellent answer.
The question that comes to my mind is: why do it? would it be worth it financially?
Quite a few thousand dollars would be involved for each unit in design fees, planning consulting, legal fees, building upgrades to meet code, and servicing reconfiguration.
But maybe with all that, it would be worth it. I have heard many people say tha that they hate stratas beccause of the internal politics and restrictions on use involved. So the quesstion is, is there a premium paid for freehold over strata, and is the premium worth the cost?
It reminds me of the trend over the years to convert fee-simple multi-family projects (generally rental apartment buildings) to strata. This was very popular a few years ago, and many municipalities in BC have policies and procedures in place to regulate and administer this activity. Now here we are talking about the opposite.
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