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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

Buying a condo is half buying and half renting.

As an approximation, condo fees make explicit a number of recurring costs that are only implicit when you own. E.g. heating/cooling, maintenance, landscaping, accumulating an emergency fund, etc. Thus, if a condo is half-renting, so is buying a house.

My condo owning friend got a special assessment of $40k to replace the siding.

There are A LOT of costs which are not explicit when owning a condo.

Some condo corporations are poorly managed and lack sufficient emergency funds, or proper maintenance, and thus resort to special assessments that are not funded in advance. The same is true of many homeowners.

As a homeowner, that is 100% in your control whereas with a condo it isn’t. I have seen so many times in the local news about condos who are underwater because the board decided to not proactively save and fix things which was a democratic decision made by the board.

Honestly I have such low trust in the ability for humans to plan for the future over the now. It is like a bug in our psychology.

>As a homeowner, that is 100% in your control whereas with a condo it isn’t.

As a homeowner I have definitely had some 5 figure costs over the years that were totally unexpected and several in the low 5 figure range that really needed to be done. Doesn't mean I couldn't cover them in some way shape or form but they happened.

Nothing keeps the condo owner from realizing how underfunded the association is and saving that amount each month for the inevitable emergency.

Most home owners don’t do this either, but it’s pretty much the same thing short of an association leaving stuff so long it ends up being more expensive overall.

Stuff like siding isn’t really all that hard to predict - it typically has a useful life and easy to calculate like a roof. Might get lucky or unlucky but it all averages out in the end over time. If you’re not saving/spending about 2% of your property value each year for maintenance you are almost always running on hopes and prayers.

Granted, the outlier cases a condo owner has far less control over the situation- including neglect to the point of building collapse.

Any good realtor will look into the maintenance history of the building and let you know if a special assessment is likely soon, and any good condo board will be transparent with you about this as well.

A condo somehow combines the worst aspects of buying and renting.

That would be an HOA moreso than the features of a condo, although a condo tends to imply an HOA in the US. The irony of my experiences with an HOA is that its actions tended to suppress my property value rather than preserve or grow it.

I don't know how a condo building could operate without some kind of shared ownership structure for the common areas and shared infrastructure. What are the alternatives to an HOA in a condo building?

actual laws about such things, I presume.

hoas only make sense to me in condo situations - but even then you’re at the mercy of others

As a non american I have no idea what a "condo" is. Is it like an apartment? Or a big house?

Condo means an apartment that you own (vs rent).

Interesting.. I would never think Condo described the financial relation you had with the house but not some intrinsic quality of the house itself.

Technically it doesn’t (as it means condominium which in theory could be single family homes) but practically it almost always means an “apartment you own” though sometimes “half a duplex” or similar proportions of a quad or six plex style.

But in the US it usually implies neighbors above and below and on the sides.

I'm more curious now: what sort of apartment does not have neighbours nearby?

It’s the above and below; most people in the USA will think “condominium tower” when you say condo, but some (rarer) are much more like duplexes or single family homes.

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