Real Tip When Buying A Salt Lake Condo !!
Buying a Condo in Salt Lake, or for that matter any where else? Here is as good a tip as your going to get. It's simple and it could be as important as your home inspection but it's a whole lot cheaper.
Condition the sale on review and acceptance of the minutes of the most recent 12 months of Home Owner Association meetings. Those minutes will tell you a lot about the project, the neighborhood, your future neighbors and the general personality of your Condo, Town home or P.U.D.
The easiest way to do this in Utah, is have your agent note on the Real Estate Purchase Contract(REPC) in Para. 7e that 12 months of HOA minutes are part of the sellers disclosures. Read more on contingencies.
Spend the time going over the minutes with your agent. Some of the things to Look for are recurring complaints, disgruntled home owners, potential litigation, and recurring maintenance expenditures. If you notice home owners that people are complaining about, make sure you won't be moving next door to them.
You'll also identify from the minutes the home owners that are most involved. Those are the people you want to talk to.
Last month while doing our due diligence for a potential client, on a town home project in Midvalle, we noticed that the police had been called to a unit a number of times to talk to an owner of one of the Condominiums. The tenant was threatening his neighbors with a tazor. The minutes revealed a position the HOA was taking, which was delaying pressing charges until after another law suit was settled with the same owner over damages inflicted on the common area. That home owner would have been living 2 doors down from our client. SOUND LIKE A NEIGHBORHOOD YOU WOULD ENJOY?
The story does have a happy ending though. Within a week our client had settled on a Taylorsville, Condo, (Village 2) where the minutes showed a well run Home Owners Association, a well administered budget, and a nice balance in the reserve account.
To learn more about the history of condos, go to my Salt lake Homes website and find out where the first condominium project in Utah was.
In the meantime, call me 801-5676-0946 if you need any more tips on buying a Salt Lake Condo.
Thanks for being here.