Condominiums tend fall into the love them or hate them position
for buyers. Here's primer on condominiums.
Condominiums
Condominiums are all about communal living, which can be good or
bad depending upon your personal views. This type of communal
living doesn't refer to the failed experiments of the sixties
wherein hippies packed into a structure and shared everything.
Instead, the modern condominium community is all about sharing
common spaces as well as rules, rules and more rules.
Condominiums come in all shapes and forms. Condos can be found
in a single high rise building in a downtown area or in an
apartment complex type of layout in a planned community. The
structure isn't the determining point. Instead, the issue is how
the properties are owned.
Unlike a stand alone home, the property lines on a condominium
are the walls of the structure. Essentially, you own everything
inside the condominium as your individual property. Everything
outside the condominium is owned jointly with the people who own
the other units. These areas are known as common areas and are
subject to group rule.
Every condominium has a homeowners association in one form or
another. The association has rules set out by the original
developer regarding landscaping and so on. Members of the
community are then elected to the board of the association,
whereupon the immediately become a focal point of aggravation
from individual owners and often wonder why they took the
thankless job.
The problem with the association and condos in general is the
issue of uniformity. If you desire to change the exterior of
your condominium in some way, you must comply with the rules of
the association. This means you cannot paint your property a
different color, do landscaping and so on. For some people, this
isn't a problem, but others are frustrated they can't express
themselves.
When deciding whether a condominium is a good option for your
next purchase, you need to carefully weigh the restrictions of a
particular association. If you consider yourself an individual
and want to show it, a condominium is probably a very poor
choice for you.
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