Totally agree, yet there are quite a few here who have a canary when their amenity fee goes up $15 each year.........

Spot on-I have been involved with three HOA Boards (two up north and one in Florida). You are correct--most HOA Board members ONLY care about "How much is the fee going up?"

Then--they reduce services to keep the fees "as is". We had an AWESOME landscaper but the water bill, insurance and pool maintenance went up--so they dumped the great landscaper and went with a lower quality (and cheaper) company to "keep the fees the same." We want with a cheaper landscaper instead of adding fees for the OTHER services that went up.

And it shows..our neighborhood no longer looks great (we used to be on par with the Villages) and now landscape beds have no flowers, they just blow the grass into the street, the sprinkler heads are constantly damaged because they use HUGE commercial machines everywhere, the common areas are no longer trimmed (they spray RoundUp every other month to kill the grass along beside the walls rather than string-trim-so now we have a 8" brown strip at the base of the community fences and walls rather than green grass). Ugly. But we saved a few bucks....

The Board excitedly claims they kept fees the same and "when you go to sell our association fees are low! That's a selling point!" But who wants to buy when the HOA across the street is 10 years older but still looks as good as the year it opened?

Short-sighted and a slippery slope. Now we look like a neighborhood with low fees. Once of the things my wife and I loved about the Villages is how well-kept it looked--everywhere.

Kudos to the Villages--the maintenance is one of the major reasons so many people look at ten, twenty and thirty year-old neighborhoods here that still look great. It comes at a cost to the residents but it also GREATLY protects/promotes your home's value.

I disagree. If you keep the funds yourself and earn interest on it, what's to stop you from selling and moving out just before the roof needs replacing. Then the next owner gets stuck with the entire cost.

It seems to me that if the roof needs to be replaced every 20 years, then every year, whoever owns the unit should pay 1/20th the estimated cost as their fair share.

That is the purpose of a replacement reserve study.

I'm kind of confused as to how a condo owner is going to replace rebar on a building that is deemed to be old and unsafe? How does one spend their $100k new fees to fix a portion or all of the building? Or is it a demolish the building and one agrees to pay $100k for their new condo?? Makes no sense to me. If you buy a delapidated 50 year old condo what happened to "buyer beware" and inspections?

What does the $100k do for condo owners?

Condo
 

We were more fortunate with our Clearwater property. We were billed 11,200 but were told it was a one time charge to have the necessary funds in our HOA as required by the state. Hey, it was a lot less than our bond in the villages.

I am not a structural engineer, so I don't know how the concrete repairs are accomplished.

What I know is that it is pricey. All the owners contribute their $100,000 into the fund and, with good budgeting and management, hope it will be enough to preserve their condo for another 20 or more years.

Without the repairs, the condos are nearly worthless. With timely maintenance, the condo is worth much more than $100,000.

Survive?

We could have bought a condo on the east coast, but after visiting my (now late) mother-in-law, multiple times in Boca, the "Condo-Commandos" drove me bonkers...

It was like an episode from "Seinfeld"...

A buyer would know how old the roof is and use that as a negotiating point. Everyone at the condos in The Villages have voted to only do special assessments and not pay maintenance monthly and it had worked thus far.

Of course it has worked well thus far. It will continue to work well until something happens that requires the special assessment, just as it worked well for the condo owners near Miami - until it didn't.

I suspect there is a significant difference in maintenance cost between what is essentially a townhouse and a high rise building. What works well for one may not work at all for the other.

Bugs
 

Timely that I tired of catching and eating lobsters. :-) Fortunately, the short game is coming around to where I can enjoy these pretty golf courses here.

The beach condo folks are looking at some sudden, large increases in things like "reserves" funding. OTOH, there's a couple of new tall ones going up near our old one with some crazy numbers for the unit prices.

Had a tennis acquaintance explain to me that getting on a condo "board" can be utilized as a means of acquiring "kickbacks". Definitely do not miss the "condo commandos", however much fun it was to test their logical reasoning capabilities. :-)

New Law
 

The new law gives prison time to those on the board who get any kind of a “kick back”.
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And they board better keep good records.

Rebar
 

Not an expert on the rusting rebar in concrete on the beach, but found it interesting to learn - back when we were looking to buy down yonder - that essentially all of the balconies on all of the high rises in the regions on either side of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea had already been replaced in the recent past for that reason.

Did a fair bit of "looking into" that collapsed high rise. The problems that led to it had been known of for quite a long while. Ugly stuff.

The (leaking) pool above the underground parking in our condo on Pompano Beach was in the process of being replaced when we left. The processes and time involved for getting that work started was right concerning.

Boards
 

Thanks. Reading that reminds me of that one owner down on the third floor whose hobby was filing goofy lawsuits against the board. Don't miss it.

Interesting article. I don’t know why anyone would want to be on the board! Not much upside and huge downside!

Agreed. It is not hard to suss that out when you move into a condo. If you move into a home that was built in 2005; and and the roof has NOT been replaced; shame on you for being "surprised/assessed" when the $20,000 roof needs to be replaces in 2025.

Still--my heart goes out to those retirees that are stuck with the bill in 2024 for the past twenty years of indifference.