When 113 Calgary Condo Owners Lost Their Titled Parking

What actually happened

Verve Condominiums sits in Calgary's East Village. In June 2026, owners received notice from First Service Residential, the company that manages the building, that a reshoring project would require access to our underground parkade. Reshoring, in plain terms, is temporary structural support — in this case to maintain the structural integrity of Verve's garage while the development next door built its own parking garage.

The notice arrived on June 16. The original deadline to be out was June 26. That is ten days to find alternative parking in the downtown core, during Stampede.

The original compensation offer was $275 per month plus a one-time $100 gift card for the inconvenience. Owners pushed back. The number moved to $310 per month for the four months the work was projected to take, and the count of affected owners came down from 123 to 113.

As CTV News reported on July 9, more than eighty of us organized. Under the building's bylaws, calling a special meeting with the management company required signatures from 15 per cent of residents. We got them. The meeting was scheduled. Residents were still expected to vacate by July 13 regardless, or face legal action.

I am not writing this to relitigate my own building's decisions. The board has said it acted on legal advice and worked to reduce the impact where it could, including securing the compensation. I am writing it because almost every owner I spoke to was operating on an assumption about titled parking that turned out to be wrong, and that assumption is extremely common among the buyers I work with.

The assumption that was wrong

Here is what most people believe: titled parking means I own it, and if I own it, nobody can take it from me.

The first half is true. A titled parking stall in Alberta is a real property interest with its own certificate of title. You can sell it, in many cases separately from your unit. It appears on a title search. It is genuinely different from an assigned stall, which is common property the corporation licenses to you and can generally reassign, and different again from a rented stall, which is a monthly arrangement with no ownership at all.

The second half does not follow. Owning a stall does not exempt that stall from the physical building it sits inside. If the structure above or around it requires work, the work happens. Your title gives you a claim to compensation and a seat at the table. It does not give you a veto over structural engineering.

That distinction is worth understanding before you buy, not during a ten-day notice period. It changes what "titled parking included" is actually worth in a listing, and it changes the questions you should be asking.

The risk came from next door, not from us

This is the part I think about most as a REALTOR®.

Nothing was wrong with our building. The reshoring was not deferred maintenance, not a failing garage, not a board that let the reserve fund run dry. It was work required to protect our structure while somebody else's project went in beside us.

When buyers evaluate a condo, they look at the building. They read the reserve fund study, they check the age, they look at the fee history. All correct, all necessary — and all of it is about the four walls they are buying into.

Almost nobody looks out the window and asks what is going to happen to the empty lot next door. In a dense, actively developing area — East Village, the Beltline, anywhere the city is adding density — that lot is not staying empty. What gets built there can affect your access, your parking, your views, your noise, and in our case your legal right to use property you own.

You cannot eliminate that risk. You can price it, and you can go in with your eyes open.

What owners actually have: the bylaw threshold

When individual owners could not get a response, the thing that changed the situation was organizing.

Our bylaws set a threshold — 15 per cent of residents' signatures — to compel a special meeting with the management company. That number is not a formality. It is the mechanism that converts a group of frustrated individuals into a body the corporation has to sit down with. Once the signatures were collected, the meeting was scheduled.

Every condominium corporation in Alberta has thresholds like this written into its bylaws: to call a special meeting, to requisition a vote, to challenge a decision. Most owners have never read them and could not tell you what their number is. It is in the bylaws, which every buyer receives as part of the document package, and which most buyers skim for the pet and rental restrictions and then put down.

If you take one practical thing from this: find your building's number before you need it.

Board, management company, developer — who is who

A lot of the frustration in a situation like this comes from owners not knowing who they are actually dealing with.

The board is elected from among the owners. They are volunteers, they are your neighbours, and they carry legal duties to the corporation. They make the decisions.

The management company is a contractor hired by the board. They execute, they communicate, they collect fees. They do not set policy, and they answer to the board rather than to you individually. In our case the original notice came from the management company, and CTV reported that it did not respond to a request for comment.

The developer next door has no relationship with you at all. They have agreements with the city and, where their work touches your property, potentially with your corporation. You are not their customer.

Knowing which of the three you are actually asking for something determines whether your email goes anywhere. Owners who send grievances to the management company about a board decision, or to the board about a developer's schedule, tend to get mass-email replies.

What I check for clients now

This experience changed my buying checklist. When I take a client into a condo, these are now non-negotiable questions:

1. Is the parking titled, assigned, or rented? Confirm it on title, not from the listing description. All three exist in Calgary and they are worth different amounts.
2. What is next door, and what is it zoned for? If there is a vacant lot, a surface parking lot, or a low-rise in a high-density area, find out what can be built there. This is public information.
3. What does the bylaw require to call a special meeting? Find the percentage. It is the only real leverage owners have when something goes wrong.
4. How does the corporation communicate? Board minutes tell you this. A board that documents decisions and consults owners behaves very differently under pressure than one that governs by mass email.
5. Has the corporation faced anything like this before? Minutes and financial statements show you how they handled it — and whether owners ended up compensated.

None of this makes a condo a bad purchase. I own one. I am not leaving. Condos in Calgary right now are the softest segment in the city, which means real negotiating room for buyers who know what they are looking at. The point is to be the buyer who knows.

Why I am telling you this

Most agents will not write this article, because it is easier to sell condos if buyers do not think too hard about the corporation behind the door.

I would rather you buy the right one. I have been on the owner's side of a notice that arrived with ten days on it, in a group chat with eighty neighbours trying to work out what our rights actually were. That is not a hypothetical for me and it does not read like one when I go through a document package with a client.

If you are looking at a Calgary condo and want someone to read the documents properly — the reserve fund study, the minutes, the bylaws, the insurance deductible, and yes, what is zoned for the lot next door — send it to me. I will tell you what it actually says, including when the answer is walk away.

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