Can you believe that, it’s incredible… there’s thousands and thousands empty condos in Montréal, a lot are new, and they continue to build them, sometimes even in high rising towers and all. A lot of them are illegal airbnb too.
Why they cannot sell them? They are small, expensive, and sometimes badly placed (no metro, no parking, bad area, place without services around, etc).
13 in 3 months in downtown area!!!
Here in Ontario I see new condos going up constantly. I can’t imagine having a mortgage on a condo, plus paying condo fees forever. Who can afford them?
Condo fee is just like home maintenance, except you pay monthly and not when the water heater, A/C break, or when you lose siding in a storm etc.
And until that money is needed for repairs, it just sits in a bank account where it’s still technically yours. It’s part of the value of the condo if you decide to sell. It’s basically just a mandatory emergency fund.
Yeah exactly. We bought from previous owner who had prepaid strata for that year, so that was an asset as part of the sale.
For us it also covers yard and tree maintenance, roof repair, plumbing in the walls, salting parking lot and plowing /shoveling in the winter, etc; basically a long list of homeowner costs you would pay somebody to do or use you valued time to remedy. We vote on increasing strata fee to cover other things, owners are in control of it so I don’t see why people have such an issue
Money laundering CEOs, politicians, cartels, and other unsavory parasites.
Criminals.
Isn’t it the norm for a property to generate fees forever? It’s a passive depreciating asset, just like a house
Yeah. My condo fees have replacedy roof and all of the windows in my townhome over the past 3 years. Plus have mowed the lawn, and plowed the driveway.
They’re just smoothing out the cost spikes.
Condo fees in toronto are absolutely insane. More than my whole mortgage in many cases. No pool, no facilitirs, no concierge and yet somehow condo fee still $500+, i dont get it.
My condo fees in montreal are mostly reasonable.
As a condo owner, you should have access to the building’s financial documents. You can look at where all the money is going, and if something is wasteful, bring it up at the co-owners meeting.
I have a condo just outside chicago but downtown the condo fees are so high I could not do one with a mortgage if they were even like 100k instead of like a mil.
It’s not first buyer, because not a lot of people can have a 5k or 6k mortgage + condo fee (can easily be 800-1000 per month in high rises when you have security+pool+gym etc) + property taxes (about 600$/month too in MTL for 1M).
I ask myself this all the time.