Pros and Cons of a HOA

 

When purchasing a property, it’s really important to see if the house has HOA dues or if it doesn’t. Now, there are pros and cons to having a homeowners association. Some of the pros are it’s a quality of life, it creates a lifestyle. Maybe it has a swimming pool, and walking trails, maybe it’s a private community, and maybe the value is there for you to want to buy into an HOA. You can also offset some of your outside bills, like gym membership and things like that. Also, some utilities are included in HOAs. Now, the other side of HOAs to be mindful of is the cost and how that affects your buying power. When you’re buying a house with HOAs, it’s usually about $10,000 of buying power that you lose for every $100 of the association dues.

So a lender is going to look at those association dues as something like maybe a car payment. So making sure that this is something that you’re comfortable with, your budget is really important, and also taking that factor of what those monthly dues are, because they’re not changing, they may increase, but factoring that in when you’re buying a house with an HOA, a benefit of that is the exterior of the property sometime is included with condos, for example, and then sometimes the common grounds are also taken care of. So there’s definitely pros and cons. We want to be a resource for you and make sure that it’s a good fit for you.