Condominium Lending Group sponsored one of the Chaos Carts at the CCI Toronto & Area 4th Annual Golf Tournament, held Thursday, September 10, 2026 at The Club at Bond Head in Beeton, Ontario. We used ours to run a game we called the Navigating Complex Capital Repair Mini Putt Challenge. The premise was simple. The putt is never straight. Neither is a capital repair project.
What we took away from the day was not the leaderboard. It was the conversations. Throughout the day our team spoke with property managers, board members, and industry partners about the projects their corporations are trying to get funded right now.
The Chaos Carts, and what we did with ours
Chaos Carts were new to this tournament in 2026. CCI Toronto added them to the sponsorship list for the first time this year, and several companies each took one, so ours was not the only one out there.
Ours became a putting game built with the obstacles the name invites. Players had to work the ball around barriers to reach the hole, and the route that looked shortest almost never was. It produced a lot of laughs and some genuinely competitive attempts. The tournament’s own putting contest ran earlier, at registration and the BBQ lunch, before golf started at two. Ours was out on the course, with things in the way.
A capital repair project rarely goes sideways because a board picked the wrong contractor. It gets complicated because several smaller things move at once, and none of them move on the schedule anyone drew up at the start.
Why a mini putt course is a fair picture of a capital repair project
Boards tend to picture a major repair as one decision: approve the work, then do the work. In practice it is a sequence of decisions that each have their own obstacle in the way. Here are six that come up constantly in our work with boards.
- The reserve fund does not cover the whole job. A reserve fund study holds an estimate for a component, and the tender comes back at a different number. The gap is the part the board has to solve. See our page on reserve funds and financial planning.
- Owners have to be brought along, and early. Owners who hear about a major project for the first time at the meeting where it is being approved will push back harder than owners who have been told what is coming. We wrote about that in how to avoid ambushing owners with difficult news.
- Borrowing is a governance step before it is a finance step. A board cannot decide to borrow on its own. In Ontario, section 56 of the Condominium Act, 1998 requires a borrowing by-law, and that by-law does not take effect until owners of a majority of the units vote to confirm it and a copy is registered. British Columbia and Alberta use different instruments, but an owner vote is the common feature. That is calendar time, and it belongs in the project schedule rather than bolted on at the end.
- Contractor availability sets the timeline, not the board. A restoration contractor with a full season will give you a start date, not a preference. Miss the window and the work can slide to the next year, usually at a higher price.
- Opening up the building finds work nobody could see. Envelope and garage projects in particular have a habit of growing once the first section is exposed. Scope changes mid-project, and the funding plan has to be able to absorb it.
- Waiting has a cost too. Deferring a repair does not freeze the price. It usually moves it up, and it can turn a planned project into an emergency one. We covered this in unintended consequences in capital repair planning.
What makes a project hard is the pile-up. A volunteer board is usually dealing with several of these at once, and usually for the first time.
The projects that came up on the course
They came up by name. Elevator modernizations, parking garage restorations, building envelope repairs, and roof replacements. In our experience the financial position behind them is usually some version of the same story: the component is due, the reserve fund holds part of the cost, the rest has to come from somewhere, and nobody wants to hand owners a large one-time bill.
Rising construction costs came up, and so did aging infrastructure. In our experience that combination bites hardest when several major components come due inside the same few years, which is what turns a reserve fund shortfall into a special assessment conversation. It is the conversation most boards would rather not have with their owners.
A lot of boards know financing is an option without ever having seen the two paths costed side by side for their own building. If that is where your board is, our guide to condo loans versus special assessments sets out how the comparison usually works.
How we help once the project is real
Condominium Lending Group provides financing for condominium and strata corporations and works with nothing else. We do not lend to individual unit owners or buyers. The loan is made to the corporation and repaid through common expenses over a term that typically runs from three to fifteen years, with no personal guarantees and no personal credit checks from owners. To date we have arranged more than $500 million in financing for over 100 corporations across Canada.
In practice that means a board can complete the work when the building needs it instead of when the reserve fund catches up, and owners see a predictable monthly amount rather than a single large cheque. Whether that is the right answer depends on the corporation’s financial position, the state of its components, the term it can carry, and what its owners can absorb. It is worth modelling before a board commits either way. Our capital repair and building systems financing page covers the project types we see most, and our special assessments and levies page covers the shortfall case.
Why CCI Toronto & Area events matter
The Canadian Condominium Institute, Toronto & Area Chapter does a lot of the unglamorous work behind the Ontario condominium sector. Education and advocacy, plus the events where managers, directors, engineers, lawyers, and lenders end up in the same room. A condominium corporation is served by all of those people at once, and they do their best work when they actually know each other.
That overlap is why we keep showing up. Earlier this year we joined CCI Toronto’s Condos Unplugged podcast to talk through special assessments with Jason Truman of Edison Engineers, which is roughly the same conversation we had at the cart, just with better audio. These events are less about the sponsorship than about listening. A golf course is a better place to find out what is actually worrying boards this year than any survey we could run.
Thank you to CCI Toronto & Area
Thank you to the organizers at CCI Toronto & Area for a well-run tournament, and to everyone who stopped at our Chaos Cart to take a swing at the Navigating Complex Capital Repair Mini Putt Challenge. You were good sports about a course that was designed to be unfair.
Talk to a condo financing specialist
If your corporation is working through a capital repair project and the funding plan is the part that is stuck, reach us through our contact form or call 289-470-5513. There is no cost to the first conversation.
Related reading from Condominium Lending Group
- Condo Loans vs Special Assessments: What Boards Must Know
- Reserve Fund Study: A Complete Guide for Condo Boards
- Unintended consequences in capital repair planning
About the author
Lyndsey McNally is a director at Condominium Lending Group and a licensed condominium manager who has worked with condominium corporations since 2002. She is Past President of the CCI Toronto & Area Chapter and a CMRAO subject matter expert, and she teaches Financial Management for Condominiums as a faculty instructor at Humber College. She was named ACMO’s Property Manager of the Year in 2017 and holds a Fellowship from the Canadian Condominium Institute.
