If your council runs a bare-land or air-space strata, most of the BC strata guidance you can find online isn’t quite written for you. Council resources, regulator pages, and even legal commentary tend to default to the condo-tower mental model, with bare-land and air-space treated as footnotes. The footnotes are sometimes wrong.

This piece is the unfooted version: where bare-land and air-space stratas actually differ from condo stratas in the operational ways that matter to councils, and where they don’t.

Quick definitions

A bare-land strata is a strata corporation where each strata lot is a defined area of land (with boundaries on the strata plan) rather than a defined volume of building space. Each owner typically owns their lot of land and any house or improvements on it. Common property is the land between the lots (roads, green space, sometimes shared utilities). Bare-land stratas are common in townhouse-style developments where each unit sits on its own lot, in mobile-home parks, and in some rural cluster-housing.

An air-space strata is the inverse: the strata lot is a defined volume of space (typically a residential or commercial unit in a building) within a larger building structure that is itself owned separately or by a different entity. The air-space strata exists “in” the building rather than “as” the building. Air-space stratas are most common in mixed-use redevelopments — the residential floors above a commercial podium, or a condo development that overlaps with retail or hotel uses owned by a different corporation.

Both are governed by the BC Strata Property Act, but the way the SPA applies in practice differs in several ways.

Depreciation reports

The legal obligation is the same: any strata corporation with five or more lots, bare-land or air-space included, is on the post-2024 five-year depreciation report cycle and the July 2026 / July 2027 deadline applies.

The contents of the report differ.

For a bare-land strata, the depreciation report focuses on the common property — roads, drainage, lighting, shared utilities, fences, retaining walls, signage, landscaping, gates. The buildings on individual strata lots are typically not in scope, because they belong to the owners individually. This makes bare-land depreciation reports cheaper to prepare than condo reports (often $2,500–$5,000 for a typical 20-lot development) and changes which preparer is the right fit — civil-leaning engineers and AACI appraisers often have more relevant experience than architectural-leaning ones.

For an air-space strata, the report is broader because the air-space strata typically has financial interest in (and contractually-shared responsibility for) building systems that physically live in a parent structure. The asset register has to reflect the apportionment of shared systems (heating, ventilation, structural, envelope) under the development’s air-space parcel agreement, which can be complex. The fixed-price quotes are often higher and the methodology section longer.

Repair responsibility

This is where the two structures diverge most sharply from each other.

In a condo strata, SPA s. 72 and the bylaws together split responsibility between the strata (for common property and limited common property) and the unit owner (for the interior of the strata lot). Most familiar.

In a bare-land strata, the unit owner is typically responsible for almost everything that’s physically on their lot — the house, the deck, the fence on the boundary line, sometimes even the driveway. The strata’s responsibility narrows to the genuinely shared common property: roads, drainage, common-area landscaping. This is why bare-land strata fees are usually much lower than condo fees per unit: there’s less for the strata to maintain.

In an air-space strata, repair responsibility is layered. The air-space parcel agreement (a recorded document at land titles) sets out which building systems are the air-space strata’s responsibility and which are the parent structure’s. Some agreements are clean; some are old and ambiguous. Councils that inherit a poorly-drafted air-space agreement spend a lot of legal time on it; councils that inherit a clean one rarely have to think about the structure at all.

Insurance

The insurance approach differs in both structures, but in opposite directions.

A bare-land strata typically does not insure the houses on the individual lots — that’s owner-side insurance, much like a single-family-home policy. The strata’s policy covers liability, common-area improvements, and sometimes a small property policy on common buildings (a clubhouse, a maintenance shed). This makes bare-land strata insurance materially cheaper than condo strata insurance, though it places more responsibility on owners to maintain adequate individual coverage.

An air-space strata’s insurance has to coordinate with the parent structure’s insurance. The two policies have to nest cleanly — no overlap on the same loss, no gap between them — which sometimes requires bespoke endorsements. Councils with air-space arrangements should expect insurance broker conversations to be longer and more technical than the equivalent condo arrangement, and should not assume the standard BC strata policy form is the right fit.

Bylaws and AGM mechanics

The SPA’s bylaw provisions apply in the same way to all three structures, but two things come up more often for bare-land and air-space councils.

Bare-land stratas sometimes have bylaws that try to regulate the appearance, colour, or maintenance of houses on individual lots — and the enforceability of those bylaws has been tested several times at the CRT with mixed results. If your bare-land strata is leaning on aesthetic bylaws, it’s worth being current on the recent CRT pattern (see our how to read CRT decisions article for the research approach).

Air-space stratas sometimes have to coordinate AGM scheduling and votes with the parent structure’s strata corporation, particularly on shared-system decisions. The air-space agreement usually specifies the coordination mechanism; the practical effect is that AGMs run differently and council decisions on major capital items take longer.

What’s not different

A few things that often confuse bare-land and air-space councils.

• The five-or-more-lots threshold for depreciation reports applies the same way. A 12-lot bare-land strata is on the hook just like a 12-unit condo.
• CRT jurisdiction is the same. Disputes between owners and the strata, or between the strata and outsiders, go to the CRT under the same rules.
• Strata Property Act amendments apply the same way. The 2024 reform that removed the depreciation-report deferral vote applied to bare-land and air-space stratas as well as to condo stratas.
• The financial disciplines are the same. A bare-land strata still has a contingency reserve fund, still files annual financial statements, still holds AGMs, still has a budget approved by owners.

When in doubt

If your council inherited a structure you don’t fully understand — particularly an old air-space arrangement with a complicated parcel agreement — the right move is usually a one-hour conversation with a BC strata lawyer to walk through the structure once. It’s a few hundred dollars and it saves the council from making decisions about which systems they’re responsible for based on guesses.

If you want to be told when CRT decisions affecting bare-land or air-space stratas come out, the StrataNotes brief covers them as they’re published. For everything else, our council year calendar and the pillar guide apply equally to all three structures — they’re written to be useful regardless of which one you run.