I purchased a townhome whose community was under development, the HOA dues was something like $50/month (7 years ago, can’t remember exact amount). At the time I didn’t really know how much HOA dues *should* be, and $50 didn’t look like anything to be worried about. Well, buyer beware. It went from $50 to $248 in 4 years, because 1. the HOA didn’t cover what needed to be covered. and 2. the community went through litigation due to defective building (on which we prevailed).
Lesson learned: HOA dues may be set artificially low on new communities so as to not scare away buyers, but will later get inceased at the discretion of the homeowners board according to the actual bills that need to get paid.
They didn’t fully finish my lot either. I happened to be the only lot that had a slope that was landscapable, but wasn’t landscaped, and of course it wasn’t irrigated. So when I did the work myself (getting permission from a president who then resigned), the association raised hell. So while I underwent harrassment from the neighbors while I wheelbarrowed two yards of dirt around the building, carried heavy landscaping bricks through my unit, and constructed retaining walls to finally complete my project. Took a while to bury the hatchet with the neighbors, and some of them actually told me I did a great job. I compromised by not promising to manually irrigate the new area (but hopefully the future owner will discover the irrigation valve and quietly start watering it off of the community system.)
Living in condos is nice for some, but you sure lose a lot of self-autonomy in the process–I’ll never do that again. People who actually *like* living in places like this are not expecting renegade neighbors such as myself and prefer HOAs to tend to every detail of their house.
