A lot of condos I’ve looked at are 100k or less. With a 20% down payment on a 100k condo and a 30 year mortgage the monthly payments should be <$400 a month.
But the fees seem all over the board. I’ve heard of fees as low as $120, some $500 or more a month. And they cover different things. Some cover utilities like natural gas, trash, sewer, water, and some do not. Some (I think) cover interior maintenance and some do not. Some have gyms, pools, etc (which I wouldn’t use anyway).
If the mortgage is $400 a month, then paying fees of $300+ a month would feel like a ripoff after a while unless that fee covered most of the utilities, a lot of repairs, etc.
What do other people pay, what was the value of the condo, and what do the fees cover? Can they vary wildly from complex to complex, even for fees that cover the same things or is there a general consensus that if the fees cover XYZ, they should cost ABC?
I don’t think there’s a consensus because different buildings have different costs. A condo conversion, for instance, won’t have a reasonable reserve fund set up based on the age of the building and the repairs that will be expected - for that reason the fees would tend to be higher. A building with no amenities you would expect them to be lower.
So, I have a newish condo and I pay $250/month which covers water, sewer, natural gas, snow removal, landscaping, interior common area cleaning, garbage service, building repairs, common area electricity, security, insurance (for the whole building - I have home owners insurance for my own unit), etc. etc. Personally, I feel like I get a lot of bang for my condo fee buck as similar units in my city tend to have higher fees because the majority of them are conversions and mine was a new build.
Mine are $195. There are 166 units in my complex. The monthly assessment covers general grounds maintenance, landscaping, pool cleaning and maintenance, water, trash and recycling, plus roof damage and other exterior issues.
Another thing they can cover is a reserve for large repairs. And another consideration in addition to the amount of current fees is the amount (if any) of the reserve. And bigger isn’t necessarily better–it means that fees may have been higher than necessary for a number of years (so that you as well are likely to pay more into the reserve than you will benefit from unless you plan to stay there forever). And (if I may be allowed another “and”) another thing to think about connected with all this is the likelihood and magnitude of a special assessment.
Issues such as this are what drove me to decide to buy a piece of land with two structures on it (detached garage).
Also, although you said “condo,” I’m not sure if you are aware of the differences between condos and co-ops. A co-op is typically much much cheaper to purchase and has much much higher assessments.
I spend $404 per month, and I have no idea what any of it goes towards. There’s no gym, swimming pool, doorman, or anything. It didn’t cover the new windows we got a couple of years ago, because there was an additional special assessment for that.
Your bylaws call for at least one annual budget meeting where you should be able to review and comment on the finances. I’m a little shocked to hear anyone say they don’t know what they are paying for, especially when it’s almost $5,000 per year.
My monthly fee is $240. It covers water, snow removal, landscaping, any maintenance to the outside of the building (like painting, repairs to the roof, redoing the asphalt on the driveways, etc.). It also covers the pool. There’s gym equipment in the clubhouse, but it’s pretty crappy. I’m probably missing something else that it covers.
Ours is $150, and covers building insurance, water, electricity for common areas, and a reserve fund for maintenance and other random expenses to the common areas. It’s a very small (4 units), non-fancy, relatively recent conversion, and most of our routine groundskeeping is DIY on a rotational basis - snow shoveling, lawn mowing, etc. We had to have a special assessment for a new roof last year because the reserves weren’t enough to cover it, and because our upstairs neighbor was in bankruptcy proceedings and didn’t cough up anything at all, including regular assessments, until one of my (lawyer) co-workers wrote him a nastygram explaining that he was still legally required to, but the roof needed fixing now, not several months later when he finally paid up.
Anyway, that was a sidetrack, but if you buy a condo, you should definitely look into the amount of reserves, and read the association minutes very carefully (there was a reference to possible upcoming roof work for ours, which led us to get the sellers to put money in escrow for it, which meant we got reimbursed the whole amount of our share, which was several thousand dollars).
$75 a month in a small complex. It covers mowing the lawn and snow removal, as well as other exterior maintenance for which the association is responsible like painting the back stoop or replacing garage doors on the units that have garages.
Downtown Chicago highrise. $420/month for a two-bedroom apartment. Covers maintenance and office staff, part-time doormen, landscaping, pool (but not workout room, that’s extra), elevators, and heating/cooling of the hallways and lobby. Also keeps the reserves healthy, so that in a 30-year-old building we’ve only needed one special assessment (for unforeseen exterior repairs). Our assessments are supposedly modest compared to other nearby buildings. I’ve been on the board for 20 years if you want details or percentages.
Fees in the range of $150-200 are very typical. Be careful of places that seem to be charging too little, because as Rand Rover said the association has to have a reserve in order to cover unexpected costs like the boiler blowing up. If they don’t have enough in the reserve, they can give you an assessment to cover the cost.
We we were looking a few years ago we found a townhouse we loved but the association fees were $500 per month! After a bit of digging we learned they had problems with the retaining walls. The original $100 per month wasn’t enough to cover repairs, so everyone got hit with a $10,000 assessment, and now the board is required to keep the fees high until they can build up enough of a reserve to pay for the time the retaining wall needs work.
And although it seems high compared to your mortgage, and one of the reasons we decided to buy a house instead, it is still part of the cost of ownership. I don’t do much with my house, but $150 per month is about what I budget for house related expenses. Some times it’s nice to have a lot of that dealt with by someone else.
My wife’s hairdresser is leaving her condo (or maybe it is a co-op) because the board has gone hog-wild over improvements and her assessments are going sky-high. That’s the trouble with democracy. I am interested in selling my house and buying into a condo but me friend advises strongly against it.
I can give you a personal example of this. For many years our fees were very low: Around $80 to $100 per month. Then we discovered the roof of our complex needed replacing, and there wasn’t enough money in the reserve. So we had a special assessment of about $17,000 per unit.
That was about 5 years ago. Nowadays, the monthly fee is over $300, and much of it goes into the reserve to make sure that never happens again.
A low-rise condo near us has a fee of 381 a month (and is on the market for 275,000). This is a highish-priced area (DC suburb) and it includes the exteriors, common grounds, parking, garbage removal, landscaping, snow removal, access to swimming pools / fitness facilities, access (for extra fee) to a number of community center rental spaces. I am certain it covers the building exteriors (walls, roofs), I don’t know if it’s the typical “from the paint on out” plan or not.
Another condo neighborhood in the same large development has a fee of 320. I believe that area was better built (lower maintenance); interestingly; that one has its own pool (but I think the residents have access to the larger pools as well).
I would think a high-rise and/or more luxurious place would be quite a bit higher (e.g. some I know of that are a few blocks from a Metro station). I looked up one high-rise I know of, where a similar space is going for 600,000+, and its fees are about 670 a month per one web site.
Mine is a 200k townhouse with monthly fees currently $135 a month. Pays for landscaping, exterior maintenance (power washing, gutter cleaning, termite inspection), trash pickup, snow removal (even though they normally don’t get to us until it starts to melt anyway). Does not include utilities or pool.
I was told the reason our monthly fee is so low is because our association is entirely made up of residents who volunteer to do it. They come around asking for new board members every so often and nicely remind us that if they had to pay someone to come in and run the association, the monthly fees would be in the hundreds per month. So I think it’s likely that’s the huge reason behind the disparity in fees. It’s also possible that was just a BS line to get new people to volunteer.
Do the fees vary based on how full the condo complex is? If a complex is only half full with the other half empty, are the fees double what they’d be if the complex were at full occupancy?
So is it better to look at the larger complexes or better to look at the small ones? The larger ones seem like they’d have lower fees and more anemities due to economies of scale (a pool or workout room for 100 units is easier than 8 units).
Shouldn’t be, even the unoccupied units have owners (the builder or the bank that foreclosed, if nothing else) and those owners are responsible for the fees.
Now, if there are a lot of deadbeat owners, of course the association might run low on reserves and hit the existing residents up for the fees.
I actually knew of a situation in which someone was renting a condo… the owner wasn’t paying the fees… and the association went after the TENANTS. I don’t recall the outcome of that except that the tenant was pretty worried about it, apparently this was legal.