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.

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__turbobrew__ a day ago | parent [-]

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.

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david-gpu a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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__turbobrew__ a day ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	phil21 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	ghaff a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>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.

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projectazorian 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.