The conversation about firing the property manager rarely starts at a council meeting. It usually starts in a treasurer’s car after a frustrating phone call, or in a council president’s living room after the third missed deadline in a row. By the time the formal motion is brought, the council has usually been quietly losing confidence for six to twelve months.

That’s almost always the right pace. Replacing a BC strata PM is more disruptive than councils realise, and most relationships are worth a serious repair attempt before a termination. But when it is time, the process is more legal and more procedural than it looks — and councils that try to rush it tend to create their own problems.

Here’s the version that has held up.

The signals that actually mean it’s time

A few warning signs are easy to confuse with normal friction. The list below is the one we’ve seen consistently distinguishes “this PM is overworked” from “this PM is the wrong fit.”

• Books that don’t reconcile. Either you can’t get a current bank reconciliation, or the one you get has unexplained items running month-to-month. Bookkeeping is the floor of PM competence; if it’s broken, the rest of the relationship is built on sand.
• Missed regulatory deadlines. Your fire-alarm inspection didn’t happen on time. The depreciation report cycle was missed. The annual general meeting notice went out late. These are not judgment calls — they’re calendar work that the PM is paid to track.
• Non-responsive when it matters. A 72-hour delay on a quote request is normal. A 72-hour delay when a pipe burst is not. PMs who can’t be reached during a real incident are not solving the problem you hired them to solve.
• Vendor relationships that don’t make sense. Quotes that consistently come in high, the same handful of vendors for every job, an absence of competitive procurement on material work. Some of this is normal vendor familiarity. A pattern of it is a different conversation.
• Council can’t get a straight answer on the financials. You ask why a line item is over budget; you get hand-waving instead of a breakdown. You ask for prior-year comparison; it takes two weeks. The PM is supposed to make the financial picture clearer, not muddier.
• Owner-facing complaints that the council can’t trace. Owners reporting that the PM was rude or dismissive on routine calls. One owner complaint is a personality clash; six in six months is a pattern.

Any one of these in isolation is a conversation, not a termination. Two or three of them happening at once, persisting past a “we need to talk” meeting, is the point at which most councils start looking.

The repair attempt before the replacement

Before any termination conversation, most councils will try one repair cycle. This is genuinely worth doing, both because it sometimes works and because if it doesn’t, you’ll have documented the issues — which protects council members from later second-guessing.

A repair attempt looks like a formal meeting between council and the PM’s senior representative (not just your day-to-day contact). Bring a written list of specific issues, examples with dates, and a clear ask: here’s what we need to see in the next 90 days. Ask for a written response. Then watch what happens in those 90 days.

If the relationship recovers, you saved yourself a six-month replacement. If it doesn’t, you have a paper trail and council alignment.

The legal mechanics of unwinding

Every PM contract in BC has a termination clause. Read it before you do anything else — most are 60 or 90 days’ notice with cause, longer without cause. Some have early-termination fees. A few have automatic renewal clauses that have to be cancelled by a specific date or you’re locked in for another year.

The other terms to know:

• Records and bank-account ownership. All strata records and the strata’s bank account are the strata’s property, not the PM’s. The PM is required to return records on termination, but the timing and format of that return varies by contract. Some contracts are vague; specify the deliverables explicitly in the termination letter.
• Insurance and bonding. Most BC PMs are bonded against employee theft and carry errors-and-omissions insurance. The bond and the E&O coverage usually continue to cover the period the PM was on file — but you’ll want to confirm in writing that the bond’s run-off coverage is in place after termination.
• Outstanding vendor relationships. If the PM holds the contracts with your fire-monitoring company, your elevator-service provider, or your accountant, those contracts have to be re-routed to the strata or to the new PM. Some vendors will accept assignment; some will need new contracts.
• The transition window. This is the one councils underestimate. Three weeks of overlap between old and new PM is the absolute minimum. Six weeks is realistic. Longer is better if you can negotiate it.

Don’t try to negotiate the termination yourself if the PM contract has any ambiguity in it. A short legal review pre-termination — usually $500–$1,500 — is one of the highest-ROI legal spends a council makes.

Running the RFP

Once council has voted to replace the PM, the RFP process for a new one is roughly the same shape as the depreciation-report RFP we wrote about in the pillar guide, with a few PM-specific adjustments.

Build the RFP around what your strata actually needs. Not every PM specialises in every building type. A 24-unit townhouse complex on the Island needs different things than a 200-unit concrete tower in Burnaby. Be explicit about your building, your owner profile, your current pain points, and what you want different from the current arrangement.

Send to four or five firms, not ten. Asking ten firms to quote is a signal you don’t actually know what you want. Four to five firms — three you’ve identified from referrals and one or two you found by research — produces a comparable, evaluable shortlist.

Ask for a specific person. PM firms vary a lot in quality, but day-to-day relationships are even more variable in who you actually get as your assigned manager. Ask the firm to name the senior PM who would be your primary contact. Ask for that person’s background. If the firm won’t commit, that’s information about the firm.

Ask for references you can actually call. Not “a couple of strata corporations we work with.” Three named council presidents at three buildings of comparable size and type, with permission to be called.

Score the responses against the same rubric. Communication, financial reporting, regulatory compliance track record, vendor management, transition plan, fees. A 1-5 scale across six criteria. The numbers don’t have to be precise; the discipline of scoring makes the conversation in council possible.

The transition

This is what makes or breaks the change. A good transition has:

• A documented records handover (financials, vendor contracts, owner correspondence, bylaws, depreciation report, insurance file).
• A reconciled trust-account balance as of the handover date.
• A joint introduction email to owners from both PMs, explaining the change.
• A 30-day check-in meeting between council and the new PM to surface anything that fell through the cracks.

The first 90 days with a new PM are an active management exercise for council. The new PM doesn’t know your building yet; the council does. Some recurring deadlines that the old PM handled invisibly are going to need a council member’s eye until the new PM’s calendar catches up.

The honest take

The reason most BC councils stay with a PM they’re frustrated with isn’t loyalty — it’s that the alternative looks scary. A six-month replacement project, a transition full of small risks, no guarantee the new PM will be materially better. So they live with a bad relationship and accept the cost.

Some of those councils are correct that the change isn’t worth it. Many are wrong. The signal we’d look for is whether the issues are about individual incidents or about the way the firm works. Individual incidents can be repaired; a firm that doesn’t work the way your strata needs it to work won’t change because you complained.

If you’re early in this process and not sure whether you’re looking at a repair-attempt situation or a replacement situation, the StrataNotes brief sometimes covers operational topics like this, and we’re always happy to think through specific situations by email. The council year calendar is also useful background — many of the PM-friction signals we’ve described above show up around predictable points in the council year.