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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]IMO "yard maintenance" it's an excuse to ditch boring suburbia for the more urban fun walkable areas and feel young again.  :lol: When people are no longer tied to school districts they gladly go back to the lifestyle they had before kids. I am not buying that whole "being tired of yard maintenance" when people literally desire to live in SFHs and do this for decades and manage to pay for it or do it themselves.  They don't suddenly get tired of having private outdoor spaces, not sharing walls with others, easy parking, not smelling other people cooking/smoking, etc.  They either never liked suburban lifestyle in the first place but felt like they had to give their kids this experience, or they were too broke to outsource any yard/home maintenance in the first place, had a rundown property, they felt bad about, or barely afforded their house (house poor).

These are the main reasons people go to condos. [/quote]
Even if you had money to outsource these things there’s still the mental energy of finding the people to do it, monitoring their work, staying on the schedule etc. meanwhile when I lived in the condo everything was just done when it was supposed to be done. [/quote]

If you have money then you don't need to expand much mental energy to find providers.  Just use your neighbor's providers who you think do a good job or ask friends (you can see the results).  Often providers solicit the neighbors with their fliers or even visits to the door when they come in to work on neighbor's homes.  The only time one must spend significant mental energy to the point of pain, is when money is really tight and you need to find the best deal, afraid to overpay even by a little, and try to find the best bang for your buck.

The reality with condo associations is that they won't always find the best providers of services either.  They can get scammed or overcharged just like private home owners, and you won't even be aware of it, you just realize you are paying more in maintenance fees that you have to.  Some corruption is also possible where decision makers (condo board) make contracts with their relatives or those they know, or get kickbacks. Not sure how frequent the latter situation is.  But the fact that condo associations can overpay for mediocre services doesn't go away.

[/quote]

If you have the funds it is pretty easy and stress-free to outsource lawn care, gutter cleaning, snow removal, exterior painting, etc.

But there are other things that are more complex on a SFH. Like the flashing around my brick chimney will need to be fixed up soon because I pay attention to it and can see it separating. Many people wouldn't even know to look at that stuff occasionally; they would just wait until water starts coming into their roof.[/quote]

What do you do in a condo when your window starts separating from the wall or warping? This happens, and you may not be even allowed to fix it and get a new window if condo determines it's a problem with enough units and decides to do mass window replacement.  Then you are hit with a huge assessment every month until all this work is paid for.   In the meanwhile it's not immediate fix, because you don't have rights to do things even to your own condo, so you have to live with it.    This also happened to me in a rental where the frame started warping from the moisture coming from the side wall.  I had to jump through hoops (it was a large corporate LL) to get it fixed and it took almost 2 years.  I kept getting inspector after inspector to prove there was trapped moisture and metal parts that warped and rusted had to be replaced.   So much bureaucracy.[/quote]

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