A Pembroke rental kept flooding while the board billed the wrong unit

The situation

Agus had already disputed two chargebacks with the property manager, James, directly before he called our office, and both times the response had been the same: a form letter citing the corporation's bylaws on deductible allocation, with no explanation of how the source of the leak had actually been determined. By the third incident, a stain spreading across the bedroom ceiling of his tenant, Sarah, for the third time in eleven months, he had stopped expecting James to volunteer an answer and started looking for someone who could make him provide one.

Agus worked as a mortgage broker and had bought the Pembroke unit several years earlier as a straightforward rental investment, priced in the mid 600,000s, with a long-term tenant in place and modest but steady positive cash flow. The building's plumbing ran through a shared vertical stack serving several units stacked above and below his, a common configuration in mid-rise condo buildings, and shared stacks are a common source of leaks that are genuinely difficult to trace to a single point of failure without proper investigation.

Each time water appeared in Agus's unit, the corporation's insurer sent an adjuster, water damage was repaired under the building's policy, and the deductible, several thousand dollars each time, was charged back to Agus under a clause in the corporation's bylaws allowing chargebacks for damage originating within a unit's demised premises. The trouble was that nobody had established the leaks originated within Agus's unit at all. The stack itself, serving multiple units, was common element property the corporation was responsible for maintaining, not something within Agus's exclusive control.

Under the Condominium Act, 1998, a corporation can allocate insurance deductibles to a unit owner only where the loss is attributable to that owner's unit or an act or omission connected to it; damage originating in the common elements, including a shared stack, is ordinarily the corporation's responsibility to insure and repair without passing the deductible to an individual owner. Agus's read of his own plumbing fixtures, confirmed by a plumber he hired independently after the second incident, found nothing wrong within his unit itself.

By the time of the third leak, Agus had paid two deductibles totalling a meaningful sum, Sarah was increasingly frustrated by recurring disruption and repair work, and the corporation showed no sign of investigating the stack itself rather than simply repeating the same chargeback process.

The complication

The complication that shaped the entire file was not legal, it was procedural, and it was outside anyone's control. Determining whether a shared stack was actually the source of the recurring leaks required a proper investigation, and the corporation's insurer, once formally pressed to look at the stack rather than simply pay out and recover the deductible from Agus, opened its own claims investigation into the building's plumbing infrastructure as a whole.

That investigation moved at the insurer's pace, not at Agus's or the corporation's. It involved coordinating access to multiple units above and below Agus's, scheduling a plumbing contractor qualified to camera-inspect the stack's interior, and waiting for a formal engineering opinion on where along the stack the failures were originating. Each of those steps took weeks rather than days, and the insurer was not accountable to Agus directly since he was not the corporation's policyholder, only the party being charged based on the policy's outcome. Requests for updates went through James, who had no ability to accelerate an insurer's internal process and, initially, little apparent motivation to push hard on Agus's behalf given that the current chargeback arrangement cost the corporation nothing.

This left Agus in an uncomfortable holding position for several months. He could not get the two prior chargebacks reversed until the investigation produced a finding on where the leaks actually originated, because the corporation was not willing to concede fault or reverse a bylaw-based charge on the strength of Agus's own plumber's opinion alone. At the same time, a fourth leak was a real possibility while the stack remained unrepaired, and any further chargeback would compound the same dispute before the first one was resolved.

The delay also had a cost dimension that could not be sped up: Sarah, understandably worn down by repeated disruption, gave notice partway through the investigation period, and Agus had to weigh whether the ongoing uncertainty over the building's plumbing made it worth pursuing new tenants immediately or waiting for a resolution first. Nothing about that pressure moved the insurer's timeline forward, and the file's pace was, for months, set entirely by a process none of the parties directly controlled.

James, caught between an owner pushing for answers and an insurer that owed him nothing directly, was not a reliable accelerant either. He forwarded Agus's questions when asked, but had little incentive to chase the insurer aggressively on behalf of a single unit owner when the corporation's own exposure, three deductibles already collected, was not costing the corporation anything while the investigation dragged on. That imbalance, more than any legal complexity, was what kept the file stalled for as long as it did.

What we did

1. Formally disputed the third chargeback in writing, citing the Condominium Act framework. We sent the corporation a letter explaining that deductible chargebacks require the loss to originate within the unit, that the stack was common element property, and that no investigation to date had actually established the unit as the source, putting the corporation on notice that continued chargebacks without proper cause were not supportable.
2. Compiled the independent plumbing evidence Agus already had. We organized the report from the plumber Agus had hired after the second leak, which found his own fixtures and in-unit piping free of defects, into a clear written summary that could be handed to the corporation and, eventually, to the insurer's investigator as a starting point, so the file did not open with a bare denial but with documented evidence pointing away from Agus's own unit.
3. Pressed James to formally request an insurer investigation of the stack. Rather than accept another round of repair-then-chargeback, we insisted the corporation ask its insurer to investigate the shared stack's condition directly, framing this as squarely within the corporation's own maintenance obligation for common elements, not an optional favour to Agus, since the corporation had no legal basis for continuing to charge deductibles it could not actually substantiate.
4. Negotiated a temporary hold on further chargebacks pending the investigation's outcome. With a fourth leak a real possibility while the cause remained unconfirmed, we got the corporation to agree in writing that any further water event during the investigation period would not be charged back to Agus until the stack's condition was determined, avoiding a fourth dispute stacking on top of the first three.
5. Monitored the insurer's process and kept pressure on timelines where we could. We could not accelerate the insurer's engineering assessment, but we followed up regularly through James, made sure access scheduling delays were not adding avoidable weeks, and kept Agus informed realistically about a timeline that was going to run months rather than weeks regardless of how hard anyone pushed.
6. Reviewed the investigation's findings once they arrived and framed the negotiation around them. The engineering opinion found the primary source was a degraded section of the shared stack itself, a common element issue, but also identified a secondary contributing factor in an aging fixture connection within Agus's own unit that had not caused a leak on its own but had worsened the damage from the stack failures.
7. Negotiated a cost-sharing resolution based on the mixed findings. Because the investigation did not clear Agus's unit entirely, a full reversal of all three deductibles was not realistic; we negotiated the corporation refunding the two chargebacks tied most directly to the stack failure while Agus accepted responsibility for a smaller portion reflecting his unit's contributing fixture issue, and secured the corporation's commitment to repair the stack itself.

The outcome

The corporation refunded roughly two-thirds of the total deductibles Agus had paid across the three incidents, reflecting the investigation's finding that the shared stack was the primary and recurring cause. Agus retained responsibility for the remaining share, tied to the fixture connection within his own unit that the engineering report identified as a genuine, if secondary, contributing factor. Neither side got everything it might have wanted at the outset: the corporation had to concede its earlier chargebacks were substantially wrong, and Agus had to accept that his unit was not entirely blameless either.

The corporation committed to repairing the affected section of the shared stack, addressing the root cause rather than leaving it to fail again on the next unit down the line. Agus, for his part, had the fixture connection in his unit repaired at his own cost shortly after the findings came in, closing off the one part of the dispute that was genuinely his to fix.

The months-long insurer investigation was the real cost of this file, more than any dollar figure. Agus carried the disputed chargebacks, a vacant unit after Sarah left partway through, and an unresolved plumbing risk for most of a year before the underlying cause was even confirmed, and that timeline was never going to move faster regardless of how the legal dispute was framed. What the negotiated outcome delivered was a fair allocation of cost once the facts were finally established, and a stack repair that should prevent the same dispute from recurring with the next leak.

Agus found a new tenant once the repairs were complete and has not had a further water event in the building since. The compromise reflected what the evidence actually showed, not a clean win for either side, and both the corporation and Agus ultimately treated it as the fair reading of a genuinely mixed set of findings.

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