Leaky condos and rainscreen in Vancouver: what to check on an older building

Through the late eighties and the nineties, this region built an enormous number of three and four storey wood frame buildings with a face-sealed wall. Stucco on the outside, building paper behind it, sheathing, then the studs. The whole design relied on the stucco and the caulking being perfect forever, and nothing on the West Coast stays perfect forever.

Water gets in at window sills, at the corners where a balcony meets the wall, at a flashing that was skipped or run backwards. Once it's behind a face-sealed wall there is no way out and no air moving to dry it. It sits against the sheathing every winter, and wood that stays wet doesn't come back. From the outside, it looked like a normal building.

The province set up the Barrett Commission in 1998. Looking back 20 years later, CBC News reported in 2018 that the Homeowner Protection Office had identified about 65,000 leaky condos across BC by 2003. I don't think that was a few bad builders. I think it was a whole building boom getting the outside of the building wrong at the same time.

A rainscreen is a small drained air cavity behind the cladding. You strip the cladding off, fix whatever rotted, put a proper membrane on the sheathing, then run strapping so there's a gap between the wall and the new cladding. Water that gets past the siding has a way down and out, and the wall can dry. That one little cavity is the difference between a building that lasts and one that rots from the inside.

The City of Vancouver put rainscreen into its building bylaw in 1996, and the BC Building Code required it across coastal regions in 2006 (City of Vancouver Bulletin 2009-009). So before 1996 in the city, or before 2006 elsewhere on the coast, treat it as an open question until somebody shows you paper.

Before you even go inside, look at three things:

• How deep the windows sit. A face-sealed window is nearly flush. A rainscreened wall is thicker, so the window sits in a deeper reveal.
• The bottom edge of the cladding. A rainscreen has to drain, so look for a vent or a screened gap. Stucco that runs down and dies into the concrete leaves water nowhere to go.
• The metal. Remediation almost always means new flashing, so look for head flashing over the openings that looks newer than the building, and a horizontal metal line at each floor.

Also watch for staining at window heads, blistered paint at the soffit and stucco patches that don't match. Those can be signs of past water that may or may not have been properly fixed. None of this replaces an engineer. It tells you which questions to ask.

The sentence I look for is "fully rainscreened," and then a year. Fully means all four sides, not one elevation. A year means there is a contractor, an engineer and an invoice behind it, and you can go find them.

The building I'd lose sleep over is the half-done one. New roof, new windows, new paint and nothing about the walls. New paint on old face-sealed stucco is lipstick. It looks great in the photos and makes it harder to see what's behind it. Partially rainscreened, or rainscreened with no date and no engineer's letter, means the word is doing a marketing job and not a building job.

A rainscreen doesn't fix everything, either. Plumbing is the next big bill, and it usually means opening up drywall in every suite, so ask if the building repiped. Concrete buildings aren't off the hook: the frame doesn't rot, but windows, balcony membranes and the parkade membrane all wear out. Nobody tours the parkade, and when it goes it's very expensive, so I look for that year the same way I look for the rainscreen.

A remediated building has already had its worst day. The walls were opened, the problem was found and fixed, and there's a paper trail. Some of the best buys in the city are buildings six months past a remediation that everybody is still nervous about. Somebody else already paid for it, and a lot of those owners paid by special levy and lived behind scaffolding to do it.

A new building hasn't had its worst day yet, and maybe it never will. Most are built properly under a code that learned from the nineties. You're just buying with no track record. I can't tell you which risk is bigger on any given street, because that's a building by building call. How fixed older buildings have actually resold against new ones is in the Kyle Mark Report (free account).

If you're selling one, put the rainscreen and the year in the first line of the listing. Have the engineer's completion letter, the repipe invoice and the roof date ready before the first showing. A buyer who has to ask about the walls is already pricing in the worst case.