I think that for your demographic, single girl who does not want to deal with alot of repairs and such, a condo is your best bet. However as a first time buyer and only having your own income to rely on, my concern would be that your attraction to the home may be clouding some basic budget issues. I would STRONGLY urge you to sit down and perform the following exercise… using an excel spreadsheet put down EXACTLY what your monthly loan payment would be, your HOA, and your property tax. Do the same thing for the next few years and add a few bucks to your HOA each year. Very rarely do HOA go down but them going up is commonplace. Now do the same thing for you budget if you did not buy this home and instead put the difference in savings. Also don’t forget to add in your downpayment that you would not apply if you didn’t buy the home. Then look forward 2 years from now to see how much you would have saved.
My concern here is that I believe that condos, even new ones such as these have a higher probability to go down then go up over the next 2 years. As a first time buyer, I am not sure I would recommend spending 419k on a condo. At that price along with an HOA I doubt you will ever get it to pencil out as a rental.
I don’t mean to be a wet towel… and for sure I am one who actually understands that buying a home is a decision that involves more then just finding the bottom of the market. I have many a post defended families buying while admitting that the market will continue to depreciate. I just think that as a young single professional some decisions now of abstinence may pay huge divendends not so far down the road. Now if you had a family and wanted a school district and there were other issues then I may feel a bit different.
