Questions to Ask Any EPR Provider: A Guide for Northern BC Strata Councils

The full guide

Your strata council is about to approve thousands of dollars of consulting work — an Electrical Planning Report. Before the vote, a short list of questions will tell you more than the proposal alone:

1. Ask for references from comparable stratas.
2. Read the reviews, and read them for the right work.
3. Ask for a fixed price in writing.
4. Ask whether the report is written for the council that has to use it.
5. Ask who may prepare it under the regulation.

All five are ordinary due-diligence requests, and providers who do this work regularly are used to them.

Why references tell you what a proposal can't

A proposal describes what you will get. A council that already has the report can tell you what it was like to receive it. They are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where councils get surprised months later, when the finished document lands and nobody can use it.

Ask for two or three references from comparable stratas — similar size, building type, and ideally the same region — and then actually call them. A few direct questions cut straight to what you need to know:

• Did the report arrive on the timeline you were promised?
• Was the final scope what was quoted — or were there surprise change orders?
• Could your council understand and act on the report without a technical background?
• Did the provider answer the council's questions once the report was in hand?
• Would you hire them again?

Reviews are useful, but read them for the right work

Star ratings are easy to find but may reflect unrelated work: an electrical contractor's installation reviews say nothing about how its reports read. Look for reviews that name the kind of report you are commissioning, written by a council member or a strata manager, and treat a page of generic five-star ratings as a prompt to ask for references rather than as proof.

One useful distinction: references are not the same as online reviews. Ask specifically for references from strata report clients — councils that received the exact kind of report you are commissioning.

A fixed price, in writing

An EPR is a strata expenditure approved by a council vote, paid from strata funds and disclosed in your financial records. Before the vote, the council should know exactly what it is approving. Ask: "Is this a fixed price, or will the invoice be based on hours?" Then check that the proposal defines the scope in writing: the property assessment, the utility consumption data, the buildings covered, and what the council receives at the end. With hourly billing, the number on the proposal may not be the number on the invoice, and the difference only becomes clear after the work is done.

Price belongs in the picture, but it is the last question, not the first. We wrote about why EPR prices range from about $2,500 to $14,000, and how to check what any quote — high or low — actually includes.

Is the report written for the council?

Two reports can both be fully compliant and read nothing alike. We explained why in why EPR quality varies so widely and in a council's guide to acting on its EPR. Ask the provider, and ask its references, whether the report is written for the people who have to act on it:

• A plain-language summary a non-technical council member can read in a few minutes and understand.
• A clear answer to the question the report exists to answer — for an EPR, how much spare capacity the building has.
• Recommendations tied to something concrete — capacity unlocked, cost, or timing — not a vague "consider upgrading."
• Honesty about scope and limits, so the report can be relied on for years rather than oversold.
• A structure your council could brief owners from at an AGM.

Who may prepare it under the regulation

Under the Strata Property Regulation, who may prepare an Electrical Planning Report depends on whether every building on the strata plan is a Part 9 building. Ask any provider how it answers that question for your strata, and check its answer against the regulation's own wording, which is set out in the questions on our Electrical Planning Report page.

Put it all together

Each of these checks a different box, and together they de-risk the whole decision:

• the references confirm the provider delivers what it describes;
• the reviews, read for the right work, show a pattern over time;
• the fixed price in writing lets the council vote on a known number and a defined scope;
• the plain-language test tells you whether the council will be able to use the report; and
• the regulation's test tells you whether the right person is preparing it.

Checking each proposal against BC's official preparation guidance then confirms the scope meets what BC strata law requires.

Comparing providers now? Start with the questions in how to choose an EPR provider, then put these to each provider and see who answers plainly.