None of this is a reason to hesitate. It is a reason to have the whole figure in front of you before you decide what you can afford, rather than the mortgage payment plus a vague allowance for everything else.
This guide takes each cost in turn, says who sets it, and shows how to find the real number for a specific home rather than an average. Where a rate comes from a government or a statute we name it and link it. Where a figure depends on the building, we tell you which document to ask for.
The short version
- Your strata fee funds two separate pots under the Strata Property Act: an operating fund for regular expenses and a contingency reserve fund for the ones that come round rarely.
- Property tax is your assessed value multiplied by rates set by the city and other authorities, and the home owner grant reduces the bill for a principal residence.
- You need your own home insurance as well as the strata's building policy. They cover different things.
- Repairs split along a boundary set by the strata plan and the bylaws, not by what feels like your space.
- If nobody lives in the home, the speculation and vacancy tax and, in Vancouver, the Empty Homes Tax can both apply.
The six costs, and who decides each one
It helps to see them together, because they are set by different people on different schedules and only one of them is negotiable at the point of purchase.
Your mortgage is set by your lender and your own down payment. Your strata fee is set annually by the owners of your building, based on a budget they approve. Your property tax is set by your assessed value and the rates struck by the city and the other taxing authorities. Your home insurance is set by an insurer. Your utilities are set by your usage and the rates of the utility. And a share of any large repair is set by what the building needs and what is already in the contingency reserve fund.
The only one you control directly is the mortgage, and the only one you can research thoroughly before buying is the strata fee, because the budget and the depreciation report are documents you can ask for.
That is a more encouraging picture than it looks. Four of the six can be established precisely for a specific home before you make an offer, and the fifth, utilities, can be estimated reasonably well. Only the last one is genuinely unpredictable, and even there the depreciation report tells you what is coming and roughly when.
| Cost | Who sets it | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Mortgage payment | Your lender, on your loan and rate | Monthly, fixed until renewal |
| Strata fee | The owners, through an approved annual budget | Monthly |
| Property tax | Your assessed value and municipal rates | Annually |
| Home insurance for your own home | Your insurer | Annually, paid monthly or in one go |
| Utilities | Your usage and the utility's rates | Monthly or bi-monthly |
| Share of a major repair | The building's needs and its reserve fund | Rarely, and unpredictably |
Where the strata fee actually goes
The Strata Property Act is unusually clear about this, and understanding it makes the fee much less mysterious.
Section 91 makes the strata corporation responsible for the common expenses of the building. Section 92 then requires the strata to establish two funds, which the owners contribute to through their strata fees. The operating fund covers common expenses that usually happen once a year or more often. The contingency reserve fund covers common expenses that happen less often than once a year, or that do not usually happen at all.
That second fund is the one that matters when you are comparing buildings. Section 94 requires a strata corporation to obtain a depreciation report from a qualified person, estimating the repair and replacement cost of the major items in the building and how long they are expected to last. A building with a current report and a healthy reserve has already thought about the roof. A building with neither has not, and the cost has not gone away.
In our view the reserve fund balance next to the depreciation report is the single most useful pair of numbers a multiplex buyer can look at, and hardly anybody asks for both.
Section 93 completes the picture: subject to the regulations, the strata corporation determines the annual contribution to the contingency reserve fund. So the owners decide how fast they save, within limits, and that decision is visible in the annual budget you can ask to see.
It is worth saying plainly that a low strata fee is not automatically good news. A fee is low either because the building has little to maintain, which is genuinely good, or because the owners have chosen to contribute little to the reserve, which simply moves the cost into the future and adds a special levy to it. The budget and the depreciation report together tell you which of the two you are looking at, and it takes about twenty minutes to work out.
Why nobody can quote you an average
Buyers often ask what a multiplex home costs to run per month, and want a figure. We will not give one, and it is worth explaining why rather than being evasive.
There is no published benchmark for multiplex homes at all. Greater Vancouver's MLS® Home Price Index, in its July 2026 report, publishes benchmarks for detached homes, apartments and townhouses, plus a composite for all residential property. Multiplex is not a category, so nobody publishes prices for these homes, let alone operating costs.
Beyond that, the variation is genuinely large. Two homes at the same price can differ substantially in strata fee, because one building has more to maintain than the other. Property tax follows assessed value, which varies by neighbourhood. Utilities follow how you live. An average would be a made up number dressed as information.
What we can do instead is show you how to build the figure for a specific home from documents you can obtain before you buy. That is what the pages below are for.
There is one more reason to distrust averages here, which is that these homes are new. A brand new building has no repair history, its reserve fund starts at nothing and builds, and its first few annual budgets are estimates made by people who have not yet lived through a winter in it. Fees on new buildings tend to move in the first few years as the owners learn what the building actually costs, and that is normal rather than a sign of poor management.
What we would say confidently is that the running cost of a multiplex home usually sits below the running cost of a detached house of similar size in the same neighbourhood, because the shared parts are shared, and above the running cost of an apartment, because you have more building attached to you. That is a direction rather than a number, and we are offering it as our view rather than as a measured figure.
The pages in this hub take each cost in turn and tell you which document produces the real number. Read them in order if you are early in the process, or go straight to the one you have a question about. Every rule and rate we state comes from the body that sets it, with the date we checked it, so you can confirm any of it yourself in a couple of minutes.
One thing we would ask you to do before reading further: decide what number you are actually trying to reach. Some buyers want to know what they can afford, which means starting from income and working down. Others have found a home and want to know what it will cost, which means starting from the documents and working up. The pages here support both, and mixing the two is how households end up with a figure that feels precise and is not.
Everything in this guide
Each page below answers one question in full. Read them in order or jump to the one you need.
The bills that arrive every year
Property tax, insurance and utilities, and how to find your own numbers.
Repairs and the unexpected
Who fixes what, and where the money for the big items comes from.
Working out your total
Putting it together, and the extra taxes that apply when nobody lives there.
Questions buyers ask
Also worth reading
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page comes from the body that issues it. Rules and rates change, so each entry says when we checked it.
- Strata Property Act, SBC 1998, c. 43, Part 6 (Finances), sections 91 to 94. BC Laws, Queen's Printer for British Columbia. Act current to 25 August 2026, accessed 29 August 2026.
- Home owner grant. Province of British Columbia. Page last updated 3 July 2026, accessed 29 August 2026.
- BC Assessment. BC Assessment Authority. Accessed 29 August 2026.
- Greater Vancouver MLS® Home Price Index. Canadian Real Estate Association and Greater Vancouver REALTORS. July 2026 report, accessed 29 August 2026.
Not sure where your family fits?
Tell us who is buying, roughly what you can spend, and which areas you are looking at. We will send back the homes that actually match, and say plainly when nothing does.