AA Property Management

I was on strata for a building in East Van, and through an eight-​month period of dealing with AA, I think they’ve shown to me 100 different ways on how not to manage a property. Flagrant mistakes include allowing our concierge to break the Fire Code by padlocking an emergency door and allowing our sprinkler system to miss annual inspections. The manager’s inability to solve simple, every day issues resulted to him sending us six emails per day asking for instructions which resulted to my time spent on strata equalling a part-​time job. We had to draft our own bylaws, print our own parking passes, post up our own notices and even do our own walkthroughs/​negotiations with contractors because they lack basic management skills. After six months of service that was utterly bottom-​of-​the-​barrel, we requested a meeting with our manager’s superior to relay our concerns. Rather than explain their past performance, they gave us two months’ notice of exiting our agreement. This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to our building.
Just to list a few glaring problems:
— Their emergency line does not work, and the manager complained of having to travel to our building from Richmond.
— Strata fees were months in arrears before the strata caught on and instituted a penalty system for outstanding balances.
— The manager could not keep track of work orders, resulting to cost overruns in thousands of dollars when working with a contractor. Luckily, the contractor decided to absorb the extra cost in good faith
— Resident requests were routinely ignored; we had people waiting for months for simple requests
— Manager requested members of strata to take on duties, such as managing the issuing and tracking of our FOB remotes
— When asked to obtain quotes for contractor work, manager simply responds with names of companies and their prices.
— Their correspondence and notices are full of spelling and grammatical mistakes.
Frankly, I am surprised anyone would hire this company when they would stand by their manager. They are horrible in every metric of evaluation, save their insistence on certain aspects of drafting bylaws to protect a strata against lawsuits. That was the only time I felt AA and their manager stood for anything.

I signed a 1 year lease to rent a 2 bedroom apartment and 254 W 3^rd on the North Shore with this building management company. The 2 bedroom I was moved into (for $ 1200/​month!!!) was NOT ready for my move in date. The carpet was disgustingly filthy and ripped apart around all the edges. I could pick up handfuls of dust (this is not an exaggeration), and they refused to replace the carpet. Or even repaint the walls even though they were covered in stains. The oven was absolutely FILTHY.
They use doggy bags to hold up the hand railings in the building (all you need to fix that is nuts and bolts) and the carpeting in the whole building hasn’t been changed ONCE since the building went up and this place is at least 40 years old. The toilet cover seat was broken (there was actually a chunk taken out of the toilet seat cover and piss on the seat), the balcony door wouldn’t lock, outlets in the rooms were broken, and all the curtains in the apartment were dirty, including the one in the bathroom which was covered in SOAP SCUM! Do I even have to tell you, there was BLACK MOULD EVERYWHERE in the bathroom!!!
When I confronted the landlord and called the management company, they refused to do anything about it! In fact, you know what they told me? That it’s not their responsibility to paint all the walls or do anything to make the residents completely happy! Can you even believe that? Don’t even bother going to check the place out. Place is run by slumlords. DON’T GET YOURSELF INTO A BAD SITUATION BY SIGNING A LEASE TO THIS PLACE! (especially because the managing company doesn’t even give a shit!)