Condo HOA/maintainence fee versus upkeeping a house

When you pay for an HOA condo maintenance fee, you're paying for all the costs of maintenance plus you are usually paying for an expensive (and often unethical) management company to "manage" the property. This can add significantly to your expenses.

Also keep in mind that these management companies often push "preferred providers" on the ignorant HOA board members (who usually have zero experience running a sizable property). These "preferred providers" rarely offer the best prices or guarantees. This often makes maintenance unnecessarily expensive. Conflicts of interest are commonplace.

Finally, HOA board members are notorious for keeping HOA fees too low while they live there, thus not adequately funding reserves. HOA management companies are typically hired by the HOA board members, so these horrible companies usually go along with the scam without firmly taking action to prevent such abuses and negligence from taking place. So when you are paying an HOA maintenance fee, you are often also often paying for deferred or long-term maintenance that should have been paid by the previous owners.

I've known many people who have lived in HOA properties, and not a single one has anything good to say about their HOA management companies or their HOA board members.

Your condo fee includes, broadly speaking, three components:

• regular maintenance like changing lightbulbs, replacing broken things, touching up paint and such. This generally is done by a paid "handyman" whereas around your own house you provide the labour yourself.
• setting aside money for large "projects" like replacing all the carpets or repainting all the balconies. Depending on how long you live in a place, you might have years of your fees going into a "savings account" for some every-20-years maintenance project that doesn't happen while you live there at all! In theory, homeowners should do the same, but many don't.
• non-maintenance work like lawn mowing, gardening, cleaning and such which again is being done by paid people or a service, while at home the homeowner is likely to be the one doing it.

As a result the condo fees will always be more than your costs would be for the very same kind of property but where you did all the work yourself. But it's not the very same kind of property. A house has one roof per house. An apartment building has one larger roof shared by a lot more people. That might be savings for the condo. But the condo has an elevator and a parking garage and all kinds of things that the house doesn't have. It might even have a pool, a weight room, and so on that must be maintained too. I expect that overall, houses are more expensive to maintain per unit than apartment buildings. But that difference is small, and very much outweighed by the fact the condo pays people to do everything. That's the appeal when you buy one! You don't need to paint, mow the lawn, shovel the snow, check the pool chemicals! There are lovely flowers that you don't plant or weed! Someone else even cleans the outside of your windows once a year!

So do house owners spend or set aside 500 or 700 dollars a month for maintenance? Absolutely not. Nobody I know does. My rule of thumb is set aside enough to do your cost of your roof (an easy estimate to get) every 10 years. You will probably do it every 20 years; you save at double the rate to cover everything else you might need to do maintenance on. So if a roof would be $10,000, save $1000 a year or $80 a month for your "roof fund." It will cover a lot of stuff.

Some condo I looked at cost $700 per month in maintenance fee surely maintaining a house is cheaper?

HOA's vary wildly in terms of what they do with the money collected. Some provide pools/gyms, snow removal, landscaping, etc. Complicating matters further, some HOA's maintain the streets in the neighborhood/complex instead of the city/county which can mean a lower property tax assessment but higher HOA cost. It's impossible to say whether or not $700/month is reasonable without knowing what gets done with that money.

HOA records/documents are available for you to review as an owner/prospective owner (usually you'd include a condition in an offer that allows you to back out of the contract if the HOA financials are concerning to you). You can review the financials and other documents to find out what the HOA covers and ensure that there's nothing concerning going on (low reserves and high management fees are the primary red flags I've encountered).

There is a chance the association overpays for some services or that you would do some of the items yourself rather than paying someone to handle them, and much of the time there is a company hired to manage the HOA which carries significant cost. On the other hand with an HOA you can get a better per unit rates for a lot of services thanks to scale/bulk-pricing.

In my experience with a multitude of HOA's the cost is more than I would pay to maintain a comparable home myself, but only because I would do a lot of things myself that they end up paying for.

Does upkeeping a small/medium sized house cost less than the maintenance fee of buying a condo? Some condo I looked at cost $700 per month in maintenance fee surely maintaining a house is cheaper?

You have to compare apples-to-apples.

If it is a condo building or buildings, then the monthly cost will include costs associated with the common property within the buildings. Stairs, elevators, and the like. There are osts to clean those areas regularly, paint them, and repair or update them.

There are also costs for the outside structure of the building. That includes the outside walls, foundation, and the roof. There can be annual costs, and capital costs that occur every decade or two. They may be required to set aside money to pay for these capital costs, by collecting a little every month.

There are also the costs associated with the grounds. They need to be mowed, fed, watered, and the like. They may also have trees, shrubs, and other plants that have to be maintained. The more land the higher the costs. They may also include walking trails and other things that have to be periodically repaired.

Parking lots can be expensive to paint, pave, and repair. Everybody pays the costs. Garages can be even more expensive.

The community can also have pools, and tennis courts which all have operations, maintenance, and capital expenses.

Now some of these things may also be had when you own a home. single family homes can belong to communities that have common ground, pools, and parking lots. They can even have their own pool.

Note then none of this covered the things inside the unit. That is always on you to repair and replace. The HOA only gets involved if your stuff inside the unit impacts those outside the unit.