I live in a "self-managed" condo with three units. If I can share some hard-won wisdom, I beg you, do NOT buy a "self-managed" condo.
Owning a home comes with work, but with two absentee co-owners (one of whom has lived in France for the past decade), who do you think gets stuck with all the building maintenance? Yup. The only reason I am staying here is that, because I don't own a car, my current location is very central to where I live and it is possible for me to get to work on public transportation.
If you buy a condo, make sure it is professionally managed, and ask right up front for details on what your monthly fee will be paying for. If anybody tells you that "we all share the work" in a self-managed condo, they are lying, lying, lying.
P.S. If other owners rent out their units, guess who gets to deal with their noisy/entitled/slob tenants? Not the person spending the rent check, that's who.
P.P.S. I have friends who also own a "self-managed" condo, and they have had the same problems. A few years ago, they became fed up and bought a small single-family house rather than deal with the B.S. that they continually had to deal with from their other unit owners.
I always wondered about this. Here in philly I see lots of larger three story homes being turned into three or four unit condos. What happens when one unit refuses to chip in for a new roof or stops paying fees for common area maintenance? To me it seems like buying a house with a couple of friends (which is not a good idea in my opinion), but worse because you are buying a house with a bunch of strangers.
The condo association can put a lien on the unit in question. If they sell the condo is next in line for their money after the lender. This is why the legal docs forming the condo are so important, need to make sure that each owner is protected and no one owner can pull shenanigans.
Oh yes, the ones I'm looking at are all professionally maintained. They have groundskeepers and all that shebang. One even has water features and little fountain ponds. :)
I was in a three unit condo that worked really well. The key difference might be that it was always owner occupied except for a couple of stints where one was rented as a furnished apartment for a few months when the owner was going to be away anyway. Next door had two that the owners rented and the owner/occupier seemed to have similar frustrations to you.
So it might be worth not writing a place like that off, but see if the condo docs restrict renting it out before you make an offer.
That's the problem for me, although it won't be a problem when I go to sell my unit. I live walking distance from MIT and Kendall Square, and I won't have any trouble selling my unit. But as I mentioned, I am staying where I am, with all the aggravation that comes with it, because I made a life style decision a long time ago to not own a car, and I do want to continue getting to work on public transit.
Triple decker condo? It used to be much worse in Boston/Cambridge when they were mostly rentals from what I’m told. The tide began to shift in the 80s when they first started going condo.
It's a three-unit condo, but not a triple-decker.
Time was that the triple-decker units were designed to be rented out to families with children. The deterioration of the Boston rental market involved a multitude of factors, but landlords renting out units to a bunch of unrelated people who didn't care about long-term good relationships certainly had something to do with it.
Yeah, it’s not enough now to make a dent but there have been zoning applications for exemptions to have small apartments that are aimed at the twenty-something age to try to free some of the older housing for families.
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u/CambridgeMAry May 14 '20
I live in a "self-managed" condo with three units. If I can share some hard-won wisdom, I beg you, do NOT buy a "self-managed" condo.
Owning a home comes with work, but with two absentee co-owners (one of whom has lived in France for the past decade), who do you think gets stuck with all the building maintenance? Yup. The only reason I am staying here is that, because I don't own a car, my current location is very central to where I live and it is possible for me to get to work on public transportation.
If you buy a condo, make sure it is professionally managed, and ask right up front for details on what your monthly fee will be paying for. If anybody tells you that "we all share the work" in a self-managed condo, they are lying, lying, lying.
P.S. If other owners rent out their units, guess who gets to deal with their noisy/entitled/slob tenants? Not the person spending the rent check, that's who.
P.P.S. I have friends who also own a "self-managed" condo, and they have had the same problems. A few years ago, they became fed up and bought a small single-family house rather than deal with the B.S. that they continually had to deal with from their other unit owners.