General Politics Discussion (X) [ARCHIVED] • Page 118

We bought a house about a year and a half ago and the market here was still on the upswing for a while after. We probably overpaid for the house by a bit - we've already had to replace all of the windows, the HVAC and roof will both need to be replaced within the next 3-5 years, etc. - but based on how the market was going at the time we could have ended up paying much more.

We've definitely seen the market slow down significantly here though. Houses were off the market within days, if not hours, but now they're sitting for quite a while. Part of that is due to people pricing them too high also.

 

I would also advise anyone buying a house to get one of those home and appliance warranties, like American Home Shield, at least for a year or 2 and especially if it's an older house or in need of updating.

They kind of seem like a scam, but they're only a few hundred to a thousand a year and can save you tons when you inevitably have issues with your appliances, electric, HVAC, plumbing, etc.

 

Agreed about nickel and diming. We had a package room in our aprt that was subject to theft, so we are now forced to use a delivery service called Fetch that's $25 a month. We have to send our shit to the fetch warehouse, and then they deliver (sometimes next day so goodbye next or same day delivery from Amazon). And lo and behold, the first time we had a package left at our door it was stolen so we have to schedule a window when we'll be home. All for like you said, more money and no extra value whatsoever. And I also pay for parking, valet trash (that I don't need, I can hump my trash to the trash chute myself) but it's the same everywhere. And having locked in a few years, the monthly increase is still less than a fresh lease if I moved.

 

One of the funniest things to ever happen

 

That’s awful. One of the only cool amenities our apartments have an Amazon locker. Otherwise I’d be worried about the same thing. We finally decided to not sign a new lease as it’s only a $40 a month increase over signing a lease. We want the freedom to move if we find a rental that’s a better value and leases suck when you’ve lived somewhere 3 years.

 

gotta be honest everyone, all of this housing talk today has me not feeling great about my plans for the next year or two!

 

When it comes to condos you also want to be wary of certain aspects such as the board of directors/members, and the nosey neighbors you’ll be living with who will report anything and everything they suspect may be outside the bounds of the Master Deed and By-laws. I used to work for a condo property management company and it quite literally drove me to the brink of insanity. Most of the communities I used to work with had a majority of older folks, and many of them were just fine, but the others…oh my. One of the common misconceptions I ran into on a near daily basis was that the condo owners believed we dictated their budget and therefore withheld repairs and services. In all actuality, condo Associations have a yearly budget that is handled by each Association’s board of directors. As the management company, the board of directors chooses their Association’s management company and can choose not to re-up their contract if they don’t feel the management company is responsive enough to their needs…or if they feel the management company is just being too stubborn about refusing to break the law to placate the board of directors who often just don’t give a shit. Our job was to essentially attempt to manage the board of directors and ensure they were keeping up with code. Every single day I worked there I had someone (either a community member or - god forbid - one of their adult children who didn’t live with them but visited every now and then and then disappeared back to wherever they came from after they’d filed a laundry list of complaints and called me every name in the book) call and complain that “my” services were subpar. They viewed the management company as apartment landlords, which is not at all the same thing in the world of condo Associations. Each Association’s board members chooses their vendors for landscaping, concrete, pest control, woodwork, etc. and provides the management company with their selected list of vendors. Said management company must then field maintenance requests (like several hundred a day) from the co-owners and then turn them over to the Association’s board of directors for approval. If the board felt their budget’s funds were best allocated elsewhere, we got to then turn back to the co-owners and tell them “I’m sorry, but your service request was denied” to which I was then often verbally assaulted and called a slumlord (I was a manager’s assistant with, you know, zero authority whatsoever). My manager and I would have to then attend the annual meetings for the Associations wherein we were asked to remain silent and take notes - because these meetings were an “Association affair” - while the co-owners essentially lined up one by one to, again, verbally assault and denigrate me and my manager. The board members would usually sit there silently allowing it to go on until someone would start inevitably making death threats and THEN they’d step in and suggest maybe everyone needed to “calm down”. There were always the handful of people in the communities who actually bothered to read the By-laws and had an innate understanding of how things actually ran, but it always baffled me how real estate agents wouldn’t even bother telling their clients how a condo Association functions. I would often ask the co-owners about that as they repeatedly called and emailed to file complaints and literally every time they’d tell me “well no one ever told me that.” On top of that, a management company for a condo Association is usually managing about 60-100 properties (and that’s on a small scale) so the line of requests would get insanely long. Management companies will usually have their own in-house maintenance team (ours was like…four guys) to take care of the jobs that are either too expensive coming from a board chosen vendor, or the vendors are too busy (because usually THEY were also dealing with like 60-100 other condo Associations on top of other clients) so the in-house maintenance team will be sent out (again, if the board approves). As such, when I’d have to tell them over the phone “we’re getting our maintenance team out there, but it probably won’t be until Friday because their schedules are packed” I’d again receive an earful. Everything was always my fault and they’d rant and rave and tell me they were going to get voted onto the board of directors (which, by the way, is selected, of course, by the community members themselves through the aforementioned vote), and then if they were successful they’d get on the board and suddenly realize “oh wow this sucks” and then start complaining that the community members were being mean to them. Lather, rinse, repeat. So many neighbors getting in fights and calling us to complain about each other. So many neighbors snooping around the neighborhood and calling to ask us to send someone down their block a violation letter because they had something hung in their window. So much wasted paper. The worst of it was when I’d have to drive out to the community to drop off board packets to each board member’s homes and look around at these multimillion dollar condos with immaculate design and landscaping I would never in my wildest dreams be able to afford as I’d ruminate over the recent call I fielded from someone who told me it looked like a “ghetto”. It was like dealing with people living outside of reality.

Worst job I ever had. I would get so angry sometimes that I would be shaking after a phone call from the language being thrown at me. Employees usually had to routinely leave the building and go for a walk just to breathe and feel like a human being for a minute. Eventually my blood pressure spiked and I collapsed at home and had to be taken to the hospital where they asked if there was any source of “stress” in my life and I had to fight not to collapse again into a fit of maniacal laughter.

So, yeah, I’ll probably never live in a condo I guess.

 

lol no shit

 

i rented a condo for 2 years and, while my experience can't be compared to how awful yours was, i can confirm that the community was EXTREMELY prone to complaining about the littlest thing. Hang a sign on your front door? That's a violation. Left your car parked for too long? That's a violation. Grilling out on your concrete front porch? Violation. It all gets very tiresome. It's why I decided I want to live out in the sticks lmao

 

wait a minute i was gifted a supporter package? jason was that you??? thanks for free dark mode!!!!

 

i bought a condo and the HOA and by-laws are pretty tame, and so far its been real quiet and no one has complained about my noise (im not that noisy unless im bumping tunes). and the property management company the HOA uses has been super easy to work with so far. we'll see how things shake out since its in my parents name rn but we plan on switching the deed over to my name when i can afford it which shouldnt be long

 

Oh my god the cars parked for too long. Ohhhh my god. I am retraumatizing myself lol. The sheer volume of people calling to complain that their neighbor’s car had been parked in their driveway for “too long” oh my god.

“OH??? OH?!?!?!?!? IS IT HURTING YOU???? TELL ME WHERE IT’S HURTING YOU JESUS STOP TIME FROM MOVING CHERYL’S NEIGHBOR’S BUICK HAS BEEN IN THE DRIVEWAY FOR A WEEK WHAT ARE WE TO DOOOOOO?!?!?!?”

The other thing that always got me was that the condo Association Master Deed and By-Laws are written and decided by the co-owners themselves. The board every year would present an alteration to one of the articles or a new article altogether and then they’d have a community wide vote. Then they’d break their own rules they made and get mad when someone would say “but you can’t do that.”

 

condos are where its at imo because im with you but i love my condo its all the benefits of an apartment without answering to a landlord because yeah having lanlords for years absolutely annihilated my mental health and sense of safety in my own apartment. again though theres an HOA but my building's HOA is fine. actually my neighbor is on the board and hes super chill hes some retired old guy

 

Consider yourself in a very good spot. I had some Associations we worked with that I absolutely loved. Nice board members, helpful community members, always nice to hear from them on the phone. It only made the worse ones that much worse.

 

condos are nice until you run into the old bats with way too much free time who bitch and file complaints about EVERY LITTLE THING.
That said, I wouldn't mind owning one when I'm older. They seem like nice places to retire.

 

yeah it's one of the best neighborhoods in st. louis and i believe the association im a part of runs 24 units, 12 of which are in my courtyard (the courtyard is three buildings with 4 units each) so its not a huge amount of property but its quite an exclusive neighborhood. they also dont allow renting (unless its to immediate family which is my current set up) so you dont get random renters coming and going. its really hard to get property in this neighborhood because again its extremely sought after especially at the price point i got this condo at (125k) when the average house price in the neighborhood is easily 250-300 and can get up to a million. which a million dollar house in the midwest is like a 5 million dollar house on the coasts lol. so i got very, very lucky which is why we immediately made an offer minutes after touring the unit before looking at a single other condo. it all worked out great

 

yeah doesnt seem to be any of those around me, the old retired guy on the board across the hall didnt say shit about the fact i have a cat which he saw when he knocked to introduce himself and im supposed to be paying a pet fee but the management company didnt even ask when we paid our first month of fees lol. its super quiet and chill around here

 

hopefully it stays that way, man. i don't ever want to deal with HOA's again but owning a full ass house isn't for everyone lol.

 

yeah and most houses around here are part of an HOA anyway lol. not all but a lot. one day i'll want a house but for the foreseeable future my condo is gonna be fine.

 

i wonder if that's just a thing in rich neighborhoods. i really don't know tbh, no one in my family ever owned a house lol

 

There was this one older lady, Dottie, who used to call me every week after a while just to chat and see how things were going with my life. She was the sweetest. She used to tell me about her former life working in local politics and how sickened she was by it after a while and that she felt my pain. I used to try to stay on the phone with her for as long as possible while I could see all my meanies coming in over the caller ID.

There was a community I worked with kind of like that (I’m in Michigan) and they were a smaller Association as well. I think, if I remember correctly, they had maybe 40 units if that. I almost never heard from them and when I did it was always like “Oh. Right. Right, you’re one of our communities oh my god how are you?” lol. They were backed up against a neighborhood with multimillion dollar homes as well. I remember some people in the neighborhood would actually bother looking us up just to complain about the noise from road projects that were happening in there.

 

I guess now that I’ve said that actually, if you’re looking into a condo, I’d definitely recommend a smaller community. They’re a lot more quiet and tight knit. It’s the bigger communities with 100+ units that are usually filled with/run by massive egos.

 

Oh shit!