Buying at Applejack: the document checklist

1. Pin down which phase - and which paperwork - you are buying

Every phase is its own corporation, so the corporation number and legal unit number both need confirming - and the number on the door is not the legal unit number in most of the community. Every document you order downstream depends on getting these two right. A status certificate for the wrong unit is worse than none, because it feels like an answer.

2. Order the status certificate, and actually read it

The status certificate is the corporation’s sworn snapshot for your specific unit: the real fee, arrears if any, the budget, the reserve fund, insurance, ongoing lawsuits, and the current declaration, by-laws and rules attached. It takes about ten days to arrive, so order early. When it comes:

• The fee - for this unit, this year, and what it includes. Why one number never generalizes.
• The reserve fund - and remember Applejack has a second one: your corporation contributes to a shared facilities reserve too. Ask about both.
• The rules - rentals, pets, alterations, parking. They differ sharply by phase here.
• Special assessments - any levied, any contemplated.

3. Read the responsibility split before you budget

Who pays when a window fails, a pipe bursts or the furnace dies is set out phase by phase, and the line is rarely where buyers assume. Heating equipment and hot water tanks commonly sit on the owner’s side here - that changes your monthly math.

4. Ask the section 98 question

A deck is the thing buyers fall for. It is also the thing nobody thinks to ask about, and I have seen a Woods sale where the deck came with paperwork attached: a section 98 agreement.

Here is what that agreement actually did. The deck was allowed - that is the whole point of the instrument. It is how a corporation says yes to an owner who wants to build something, without putting every other owner on the hook for it forever. The trade is that maintenance and eventual replacement stop being the corporation’s job and become the owner’s, permanently.

And “the owner” means whoever owns the unit next. The agreement transfers with the property, so the buyer inherits the obligation along with the deck - and because it lives in the corporation’s records rather than on the listing, it will not introduce itself. Nothing here is a problem to avoid; it is a line item to know about before you settle on a price.

After forty years of owners improving things, personalized decks, enlarged patios and modified gardens are common across Applejack. So make it a question you ask every time: is there a section 98 agreement on this unit, and what does it cover?

5. Trust no square footage until you know how it was measured

Applejack listings report size from at least five different measurement sources, and they disagree - sometimes by hundreds of square feet on the same unit. Ask what the number’s source is, and prefer professionally measured total finished area. The full story, with the receipts, is here.

6. Get the utility history

Especially on Victoria Street, where electric baseboard heat makes the hydro history the single most informative page a seller can hand you. Why the phase decides the bill.

7. If rental income is part of the plan, verify it now

Nightly rental is off the table town-wide. The ski season rental is the real market - but lease terms are governed phase by phase, and the rules for your phase are exactly what a status certificate exists to tell you. Verify before you waive conditions, not after.

8. Use a lawyer who does condos

Not a favour to the profession - a practical point. The declaration, the rules, a section 98, the shared facilities agreement: a lawyer who reads condominium documents weekly will catch in an hour what a generalist misses entirely. Bring them everything above.

Applejack has its oddities - that is half its charm - and this list should help buyers and sellers walk in knowing them.