Condo buyers often fall in love with a unit—then discover, days before closing, a pet restriction, a looming special assessment, or a thin reserve fund. Calgary-based CondoScan wants those surprises to surface early.
Founded by Ewan May and Nyle MacLeod, CondoScan delivers AI-assisted reviews of condominium documents—bylaws, financial statements, reserve fund studies—wrapped in a clear, source-linked report. Crucially, every output is manually validated today to build trust while the company pushes toward greater automation. “Trust is the biggest issue in AI—we manually review everything right now to make sure it’s bulletproof,” says cofounder May.
CondoScan’s initial focus is Alberta, where industry norms and liability concerns mean condo document reviews are handled by third parties—not the realtor—creating a ready buyer market for independent review. The team is live in Calgary and Edmonton, with inbound interest from Manitoba and an eye on expansion once playbooks are repeatable.
Many buyers and agents turn to generic chatbots to review documents. CondoScan argues that real-world docs—scans of scans, decades-old bylaws, and wildly inconsistent tables in reserve studies—break naive parsing. The startup built an ingestion pipeline to reliably extract rows, columns, and projections, then layers domain knowledge and human checks on top.
Late-breaking bylaw and funding surprises commonly sink deals. CondoScan cites buyers who have negotiated thousands off after reviews surfaced near-term assessments, and cases where hidden six-figure building projects were buried deep in appendices.
“Buyers fall in love, make an offer, and only in the final days discover the one-dog rule or $100,000 in special assessments,” says MacLeod. “We want that information up front.”
The team is bootstrapping, open only to strategic capital, and intentionally running a human-in-the-loop model while they harden automation. Bylaw extraction is “near 100%,” they say; financial modeling and reserve projections—where errors are costly—remain supervised.
Today, a typical review takes about an hour of analyst time plus document collection. The near-term roadmap focuses on repeatability, reliability, and turning building-level insights into simple scores that agents and buyers can act on.
In B.C., incumbents like Strata Reports and Eli Report sell lower-cost tools to realtors who then brief clients—different workflows than Alberta’s third-party model. CondoScan plans to expand methodically across the Prairies first, then evaluate markets where liability structures and stakeholder incentives align with independent review. The founders have also fielded U.S. feedback from buyers who wish a comparable service existed in their cities.
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