The agent on the sign
works for the seller.
We work for you.

The listing shows the unit. It doesn't show the building's insurance premium increase — some BC stratas saw premiums triple after 2020 — or the special assessment coming up at the next AGM, or the litigation filed by a unit owner against the council, or the maintenance votes that failed repeatedly while water ingress quietly continued. All of that is in the Form B, the minutes, and the depreciation report. Reading them — and knowing what they mean — is where most unrepresented buyers get hurt.

A property disclosure statement asks what the sellers know. Sellers don't always know about the clay tile perimeter drains standard in 1960s Victoria construction that fail silently, the vermiculite in the attic that may contain asbestos, the in-ground oil tank that doesn't appear on fire department records but becomes your liability when you close, or the Garry oak ecosystem that limits what you can build in the backyard. And the wood-burning fireplace that reads as a feature on the listing is the same fireplace your insurer will require a WETT certificate and a clean flue inspection for before they'll write the policy — no certificate, no insurance, no closing. These don't show up in the MLS. They show up in specialist reports and underwriting questions.

New homes trigger GST. Resale homes generally don't. Substantially renovated properties might. The First-Time Home Buyers' PTT exemption and the Newly Built Home exemption both have hard price thresholds — and they change. The CMHC Eco Plus Incentive refunds 25% of your mortgage insurance premium on energy-efficient builds. Getting the tax treatment wrong on a $900,000 purchase isn't a rounding error. It's a five-figure surprise at the lawyer's office.

We can almost always deliver vacant possession on the date you want. The path depends entirely on who's actually in the property. A tenant on a signed fixed-term agreement, a month-to-month holdover, and a friend of the owner with no paperwork each follow different rules under the Residential Tenancy Act — some take weeks, some take months, and some require notice you can only serve after closing. A verbal-arrangement occupant isn't the same as a tenant, but they're not nothing either. We ask the right questions before you commit to a possession date so your move-in actually happens when you expect.

OCP and NCP designations on surrounding parcels govern what can be built next door — and they're not on the listing sheet. A utility right-of-way across the backyard limits what you can build on your own land. A registered restrictive covenant on title can restrict building footprint, view corridors, subdivision, tree removal, land alteration, temporary accommodation, and more. Corner lots carry extra setback requirements that constrain what fits on the lot. And archaeological sites — protected under BC's Heritage Conservation Act whether you know they're there or not — surface only when you search the BC Archaeology Branch's database (RAAD). Vancouver Island has one of the densest concentrations of registered sites in the country.

Buyers think they're buying in "Victoria." They're actually buying in Oak Bay, Saanich, Esquimalt, View Royal, Langford, Colwood, or one of seven others — each with its own council, zoning bylaw, property tax rate, and rules that materially change what owning the property costs. Under Oak Bay's Public Sewer Bylaw 3891, homeowners are responsible for the entire sewer lateral, including the section buried under the public road; $16,000+ bills for repairs entirely under municipal asphalt are regularly documented. Langford's sanitary sewer is run by a private utility (West Shore Environmental Services, a Corix subsidiary), not the city — and if your property is on septic when a main reaches your street, hookup is mandatory within twelve months and typically costs $20,000–$30,000 out of pocket. The City of Victoria requires pre-1960 single-family and duplex demolitions to be largely deconstructed by hand under Bylaw 22-062 — $19,500 permit fee, 40 kg/sq m salvage target. Same region, different rules, different bills.

In a multiple-offer scenario, the winning bid is often lower on paper than the others. What separates it is everything around the price: subject-free vs. subject-to, deposit size and timing, possession date, inclusions and exclusions, back-up positioning if the first offer collapses. We've seen sellers take twenty thousand dollars less because the structure was right. Buyers who only compete on the number usually lose to buyers who compete on terms.

Three school districts cross Greater Victoria — SD61, SD62, and SD63 — and boundary changes can shift resale demand in days. Properties on septic need a tank inspection and field evaluation before subjects come off; a failing system isn't a minor repair. And then there are the genuinely weird ones: a Vancouver Island seller who concealed that their land sat on a protected archaeological site — the buyer lost $110,000 trying to develop it, and the agent was fined $66,500 for non-disclosure. Or a downtown View Street building where the developer placed a commercial kitchen exhaust vent directly below a residential condo's air intake — a multi-year strata war over a structural design flaw built into the property itself. The standard checklist doesn't catch any of this.